What are Generics and Why should we use Generics?

The Java Generics programming is introduced in J2SE 5 to deal with type-safe objects.

Advantage of Java Generics

There are mainly 3 advantages of generics. They are as follows:

1) Type-safety : We can hold only a single type of objects in generics. It doesn’t allow to store other objects.

2) Type casting is not required: There is no need to typecast the object.

Before Generics, we need to type cast.

    List list = new ArrayList();  
    list.add("CoderzHeaven");  
    String s = (String) list.get(0);   //typecasting  

After Generics, we don’t need to typecast the object.

    List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();  
    list.add("hello");  
    String s = list.get(0);  

3) Compile-Time Checking: It is checked at compile time so problem will not occur at runtime. The good programming strategy says it is far better to handle the problem at compile time than runtime.

    List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();  
    list.add("CoderzHeaven");  
    list.add(23);   //Compile Time Error  

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