Java Generics

[Abiodun Adisa]

Does using generics as in List<String> improve performance

[Sebastian Janisch]

as opposed to what ? Using arrays ? Using non-parameterized Collections ?

It should not make any difference if you use parameterized classes or not, since the parameters are only compile time relevant and are stripped away at compilation time. At runtime, the program won't know about the parameter and put it casts everywhere.

Hope that helped.

[Rob Spoor]

Sebastian is right, at runtime generics no longer exist. They only exist during runtime to help prevent runtime exceptions (most notably ClassCastException).