Description Brad Cupit 2006-07-11 14:49:56 EDT

when calling getClass() on a generic type, Eclipse states that a wildcard bound by the generic type will be returned. For example, the following code compiles in Eclipse 3.1.2 and 3.2:

    private static <T> void testWithGeneric(T input)
    {
        Class<? extends T> clazz = input.getClass();
    }

but javac won't compile this same code. Here's the javac error with java version 1.5.0_06:

    MainClass.java:20: incompatible types
    found   : java.lang.Class<capture of ? extends java.lang.Object>
    required: java.lang.Class<? extends T>
            Class<? extends T> clazz = input.getClass();

See this bug from the sun database:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5004321

According to the above mentioned bug, T must be erased, therefore getClass() should return Class<? extends Object>. javac appears to be correct, whereas Eclipse returns Class<? extends T>

This may be related to bug 120088 and bug 58666.
I tried hard to find an existing bug report on this, assuming that surely someone else has reported it. If this is a dupe, I sincerly apologize.

Complete source code to reproduce:

public class MainClass
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String testString = "test string";

        testWithNonGeneric(testString);
        testWithGeneric(testString);
    }

    private static void testWithNonGeneric(String input)
    {
        Class<? extends String> clazz = input.getClass();
        
        System.out.println(clazz.getName());
    }

    private static <T> void testWithGeneric(T input)
    {
        Class<? extends T> clazz = input.getClass();
        
        System.out.println(clazz.getName());
    }
}