Why should I care that Java doesn't have reified generics?

Question

This came up as a question I asked in an interview recently as something the candidate wished to see added to the Java language. It\'s commonly-identified as a pain that Jav

Answer 1

I have a wrapper that presents a jdbc resultset as an iterator, (it means I can unit test database-originated operations a lot easier through dependency injection).

The API looks like Iterator where T is some type that can be constructed using only strings in the constructor. The Iterator then looks at the strings being returned from the sql query and then tries to match it to a constructor of type T.

In the current way that generics are implemented, I have to also pass in the class of the objects that I will be creating from my resultset. If I understand correctly, if generics were reified, I could just call T.getClass() get its constructors, and then not have to cast the result of Class.newInstance(), which would be far neater.

Basically, I think it makes writing APIs (as opposed to just writing an application) easier, because you can infer a lot more from objects, and thereby less configuration will be necessary...I didn't appreciate the implications of annotations until I saw them being used in things like spring or xstream instead of reams of config.