What is the Class Of List<Foo> in Java?

Question

Class c = List<Foo>.class

doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

There isn't one. In Java, concrete generic types have no exact runtime type representation. This is a consequence of the much-maligned type erasure. Effectively, this means that List<Foo> is the same runtime type as List<Bar>; checking whether generic operations are legal happens at compile time, not runtime. Once you're in bytecode, they're all List, so saying something like List<X>.class is nonsensical to some degree.

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