Why is casting the class of a generic to Class unsafe?

Question

I\'m making a MethodPointer class in order to simulate the functionality of function pointers from C++. At first, I was doing everything with just Object

Answer 1

The problem is that getClass() ignores type parameters.

The Javadocs say:

The actual result type is Class where |X| is the erasure of the static type of the expression on which getClass is called.

For example, new ArrayList().getClass() returns a Class, not Class>.

This also means that getClass() called on a type parameter decays to a Class.