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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T10:14:55+00:00

I’ve recently started learning Scala and was disappointed (but not surprised) that their generics

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I’ve recently started learning Scala and was disappointed (but not surprised) that their generics are also implemented via type erasure.

My question is, is it possible for Scala to have reified generics, or would the JVM need to be changed in some way? If the JVM does need to be changed, what exactly would need to be changed?

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  1. Editorial Team

    No – it is not possible for Scala to run as Java-equivalent bytecode if that bytecode does not support reified generics.

    When you ask “what is it that needs to be changed?”, the answer is: the bytecode specification. Currently the bytecode does not allow for the parametrized type of a variable to be defined. It has been decided that as a modification to the bytecode to support reified generics would break backwards compatibility, that generics would have to be implemented via type erasure.

    In order to get around this, Scala has used the power of its implicit mechanism to define a Manifest which can be imported in any scope to discover type information at runtime. Manifests are experimental and largely undocumented but they are coming as part of the library in 2.8. Here is another good resource on Scala reified generics / Manifests

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