What is the concept of erasure in generics in Java?

Question

What is the concept of erasure in generics in Java?

Answer 1

Erasure, literally means that the type information which is present in the source code is erased from the compiled bytecode. Let us understand this with some code.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;

public class GenericsErasure {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        List list = new ArrayList();
        list.add("Hello");
        Iterator iter = list.iterator();
        while(iter.hasNext()) {
            String s = iter.next();
            System.out.println(s);
        }
    }
}

If you compile this code and then decompile it with a Java decompiler, you will get something like this. Notice that the decompiled code contains no trace of the type information present in the original source code.

import java.io.PrintStream;
import java.util.*;

public class GenericsErasure
{

    public GenericsErasure()
    {
    }

    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        List list = new ArrayList();
        list.add("Hello");
        String s;
        for(Iterator iter = list.iterator(); iter.hasNext(); System.out.println(s))
            s = (String)iter.next();

    }
}