Actually, .NET was in pretty much the same place, because generics were only implemented in .NET 2. They chose to add the support directly to the VM, though and

Actually, .NET was in pretty much the same place, because generics were only implemented in .NET 2. They chose to add the support directly to the VM, though and break compatibility. That being said, Java broke other things along the way back then, if I remember correctly, so in hindsight type erasure for fake generics was maybe not the smartest choice.