Java's way of using type erasure is just a compiler "trick", a List is still a list of objects like it was before. A List in CLR is really a list of integers, not objects. There's no boxing involved, nor the extra memory overhead from boxing. Of course this only applies to the basic datatypes. Real objects are stored similarly in both ways, but even then there's one typecheck less in CLR when fetching data from the list.
Nice that Java now has generics, but I still like C#'s better. From Sun's web page:
"Generics are implemented by type erasure: generic type information is present only at compile time, after which it is erased by the compiler."
Microsoft implemented generics in to the runtime, making them faster, more memory efficient and generally better working when using compiled assemblies (or jars/classes in Java) than generics implemented with type erasure.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you checked VIA's Epia SN? Don't know about the saturate part though =).
Java's way of using type erasure is just a compiler "trick", a List is still a list of objects like it was before. A List in CLR is really a list of integers, not objects. There's no boxing involved, nor the extra memory overhead from boxing. Of course this only applies to the basic datatypes. Real objects are stored similarly in both ways, but even then there's one typecheck less in CLR when fetching data from the list.
"Generics are implemented by type erasure: generic type information is present only at compile time, after which it is erased by the compiler."
Microsoft implemented generics in to the runtime, making them faster, more memory efficient and generally better working when using compiled assemblies (or jars/classes in Java) than generics implemented with type erasure.