Is it possible for Scala to have reified generics without changing the JVM?

Question

I\'ve recently started learning Scala and was disappointed (but not surprised) that their generics are also implemented via type erasure.

My question is, is it possi

Answer 1

"implicit Manifest" is a Scala compiler trick and it does not make generics in Scala reified. The Scala compiler, when it sees a function with "implicit m: Manifest[A]" parameter and it knows the generic type of A at the call site, it will wrap the class of A and its generic type parameters into a Manifest and make it available inside the function. However, if it could not figure out the true type of A, then it has no way of creating a Manifest. In other words, Manifest has to be passed along the function calling chain if the inner function needs it.

scala> def typeName[A](a: A)(implicit m: reflect.Manifest[A]) = m.toString
typeName: [A](a: A)(implicit m: scala.reflect.Manifest[A])java.lang.String

scala> typeName(List(1))
res6: java.lang.String = scala.collection.immutable.List[int]

scala> def foo[A](a: A) = typeName(a)
:5: error: could not find implicit value for parameter m:scala.reflect.Manifest[A].
       def foo[A](a: A) = typeName(a)
                                  ^

scala> def foo[A](a: A)(implicit m: reflect.Manifest[A]) = typeName(a)
foo: [A](a: A)(implicit m: scala.reflect.Manifest[A])java.lang.String

scala> foo(Set("hello"))
res8: java.lang.String = scala.collection.immutable.Set[java.lang.String]