Idea how to implement VT/VO compatibility in JVM

[Vitaly Davidovich]

Yes, but I'm not proposing to handle every value type (which is impossible
anyway since you don't know the set).  Instead, what would be nice is to
allow calling <any T> methods at runtime by providing the T parameter at
that point, after getting it via reflection.  This requires some form of
reification/VM support though.

sent from my phone
On Jan 22, 2015 8:42 AM, "Stéphane Épardaud" <stef at epardaud.fr> wrote:

> On 01/22/2015 02:34 PM, Vitaly Davidovich wrote:
>
>>
>> Ok, so the issue is really reflection/late binding here and not <any T>
>> per say.  In .NET for example, there's reflection support for generics and
>> what one typically does in such a situation is invoke a generic method via
>> reflection by specifying the type parameter reflectively.  This all works
>> because generics are reified in the VM, of course.
>>
>>  Well, yes and no: it's related to not being able to instantiate `any T`
> when you don't know `T` at compile-time. Currently you can handle every
> type in Java without having to know it by handling `Object` and every
> primitive. We can't expect people to handle every value type when it's an
> open-ended set, and there's no common superclass of value types, and
> they're not `Object` (unless they're autoboxed which doesn't happen when
> they're in containers like collections). So we can't handle them unless you
> can instantiate their type argument at compile-time. Using `any T` on
> methods only defers the problem but doesn't solve it for blind usages.
>