Downcasting in Java

Question

Upcasting is allowed in Java, however downcasting gives a compile error.

The compile error can be removed by adding a cast but would anyway break at the runtime.

Answer 1

In this case why Java allows downcasting if it cannot be executed at the runtime?

I believe this is because there is no way for the compiler to know at compile-time if the cast will succeed or not. For your example, it's simple to see that the cast will fail, but there are other times where it is not so clear.

For instance, imagine that types B, C, and D all extend type A, and then a method public A getSomeA() returns an instance of either B, C or D depending on a randomly generated number. The compiler cannot know which exact run-time type will be returned by this method, so if you later cast the results to B, there is no way to know if the cast will succeed (or fail). Therefore the compiler has to assume casts will succeed.