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Asked: 2026-05-10T22:00:14+00:00

I like generics a lot and use them whereever I can. Every now and

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I like generics a lot and use them whereever I can. Every now and then I need to use one of my classes in another project which has to run on an old JVM (before 5.0), needs to run on JavaME (where generics are not allowed neither) or in Microsoft J# (which has VERY poor Support for generics).

At the moment, I remove all generics manually, which means inserting many casts as well.

Since generics are said to be compile-time-only, and every piece of generic code could possibly converted to non-generic code automatically, I wonder if there is any tool which can do this for me.

If there is no such tool, how else could I solve the problem? Should I completely stop using generics?

There already are answers related to bytecode compability. What if I need source code compability for some reason?

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1 Answer

  1. You need to use something like Retroweaver in order to achieve this sort of thing. The other answers on this question are slightly misleading. Generics are sort-of bytecode compatible with previous versions, but not entirely (see java.lang.reflect.Type if you don’t believe me). Also, there is an issue of the bytecode version attribute, which will prevent a class compiled against 1.5 from running on a previous version. Retroweaver works around both problems while also enabling other Java 5 features like annotations and enums.

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