Java Class cast vs cast operator

Question

Having being taught during my C   days about evils of the C-style cast operator I was pleased at first to find that in Java 5 java lang Class had acquired a cast method   I thought that finally we have an OO way of dealing with casting   Turns out Class cast is not the same as static cast in C     It is more like reinterpret cast   It will not generate a compilation error where it is expected and instead will defer to runtime   Here is a simple test case to demonstrate different behaviors   package test   import static org junit Assert assertTrue   import org junit Test    public class TestCast       static final class Foo                  static class Bar                  static final class BarSubclass         extends Bar                   Test     public void test                   final Foo foo   new Foo             final Bar bar   new Bar             final BarSubclass bar subclass   new BarSubclass                            final Bar bar ref   bar                                      Compilation error             final Bar bar ref   foo                                     Compilation error             final Bar bar ref    Bar  foo                     try                              Compiles fine  runtime exception             Bar class cast  foo                      catch   final ClassCastException ex                         assertTrue  true                                     final Bar bar ref   bar subclass                     try                          Compiles fine  runtime exception  equivalent of C   dynamic cast             final BarSubclass bar subclass ref    BarSubclass  bar                    catch   final ClassCastException ex                         assertTrue  true                        So  these are my questions    Should Class cast   be banished to Generics land  There it has quite a few legitimate uses  Should compilers generate compile errors when Class cast   is used and illegal conditions can be determined at compile time  Should Java provide a cast operator as a language construct similar to C

User · Accepted Answer

I ve only ever used Class cast Object  to avoid warnings in  generics land   I often see methods doing things like this    SuppressWarnings  unchecked    lt T gt  T doSomething         Object o         snip     return  T  o      It s often best to replace it by    lt T gt  T doSomething Class lt T gt  cls        Object o         snip     return cls cast o       That s the only use case for Class cast Object  I ve ever come across   Regarding compiler warnings  I suspect that Class cast Object  isn t special to the compiler  It could be optimized when used statically  i e  Foo class cast o  rather than cls cast o   but I ve never seen anybody using it - which makes the effort of building this optimization into the compiler somewhat worthless

User · Answer

It s always problematic and often misleading to try and translate constructs and concepts between languages  Casting is no exception  Particularly because Java is a dynamic language and C   is somewhat different   All casting in Java  no matter how you do it  is done at runtime  Type information is held at runtime  C   is a bit more of a mix  You can cast a struct in C   to another and it s merely a reinterpretation of the bytes that represent those structs  Java doesn t work that way   Also generics in Java and C   are vastly different  Don t concern yourself overly with how you do C   things in Java  You need to learn how to do things the Java way

User · Answer

First  you are strongly discouraged to do almost any cast  so you should limit it as much as possible   You lose the benefits of Java s compile-time strongly-typed features   In any case  Class cast   should be used mainly when you retrieve the Class token via reflection   It s more idiomatic to write  MyObject myObject    MyObject  object   rather than   MyObject myObject   MyObject class cast object    EDIT  Errors at compile time  Over all  Java performs cast checks at run time only   However  the compiler can issue an error if it can prove that such casts can never succeed  e g  cast a class to another class that s not a supertype and cast a final class type to class interface that s not in its type hierarchy    Here since Foo and Bar are classes that aren t in each other hierarchy  the cast can never succeed

User · Answer

Class cast   is rarely ever used in Java code  If it is used then usually with types that are only known at runtime  i e  via their respective Class objects and by some type parameter   It is only really useful in code that uses generics  that s also the reason it wasn t introduced earlier    It is not similar to reinterpret cast  because it will not allow you to break the type system at runtime any more than a normal cast does  i e  you can break generic type parameters  but can t break  real  types    The evils of the C-style cast operator generally don t apply to Java  The Java code that looks like a C-style cast is most similar to a dynamic cast lt  gt    with a reference type in Java  remember  Java has runtime type information    Generally comparing the C   casting operators with Java casting is pretty hard since in Java you can only ever cast reference and no conversion ever happens to objects  only primitive values can be converted using this syntax

User · Answer

Personally  I ve used this before to build a JSON to POJO converter  In the case that the JSONObject processed with the function contains an array or  nested JSONObjects  implying that the data here isn t of a primitive type or String   I attempt to invoke the setter method using class cast   in this fashion   public static Object convertResponse Class lt   gt  clazz  JSONObject readResultObject                for Method m   clazz getMethods              if  m isAnnotationPresent convertResultIgnore class   amp  amp               m getName   toLowerCase   startsWith  set                          m invoke returnObject   m getParameters   0  getClass   cast convertResponse m getParameters   0  getType    readResultObject getJSONObject key                        Not sure if this is extremely helpful  but as said here before  reflection is one of the very few legitimate use case of class cast   I can think of  at least you have another example now

User · Answer

Generally the cast operator is preferred to the Class cast method as it s more concise and can be analyzed by the compiler to spit out blatant issues with the code   Class cast takes responsibility for type checking at run-time rather than during compilation   There are certainly use-cases for Class cast  particularly when it comes to reflective operations   Since lambda s came to java I personally like using Class cast with the collections stream API if I m working with abstract types  for example   Dog findMyDog String name  Breed breed        return lostAnimals stream                          filter Dog class  isInstance                         map Dog class  cast                         filter dog - gt  dog getName   equalsIgnoreCase name                          filter dog - gt  dog getBreed      breed                         findFirst                          orElse null

User · Answer

In addition to remove ugly cast warnings as most mentioned  Class cast is run-time cast mostly used with generic casting  due to generic info will be erased at run time and some how each generic will be considered Object   this leads to not to throw an early ClassCastException   for example serviceLoder use this trick when creating the objects check        S p   service cast c newInstance     this will throw a class cast exception  when S P   S  c newInstance    won t and may show a warning  Type safety  Unchecked cast from Object to S   same as Object P   Object  c newInstance      -simply it checks that the casted object is instance of casting class then it will use the cast operator to cast and hide the warning by suppressing it   java implementation for dynamic cast    SuppressWarnings  unchecked   public T cast Object obj        if  obj    null  amp  amp   isInstance obj           throw new ClassCastException cannotCastMsg obj        return  T  obj            private S nextService             if   hasNextService                throw new NoSuchElementException            String cn   nextName          nextName   null          Class lt   gt  c   null          try               c   Class forName cn  false  loader             catch  ClassNotFoundException x                fail service                    Provider     cn     not found                      if   service isAssignableFrom c                 fail service                    Provider     cn      not a subtype                      try               S p   service cast c newInstance                 providers put cn  p               return p            catch  Throwable x                fail service                    Provider     cn     could not be instantiated                    x                     throw new Error                This cannot happen

User · Answer

C   and Java are different languages   The Java C-style cast operator is much more restricted than the C C   version  Effectively the Java cast is like the C   dynamic cast  if the object you have cannot be cast to the new class you will get a run time  or if there is enough information in the code a compile time  exception   Thus the C   idea of not using C type casts is not a good idea in Java

[java] Java Class.cast() vs. cast operator

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