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 && !isInstance(obj))
throw new ClassCastException(cannotCastMsg(obj));
return (T) obj;
}
private S nextService() {
if (!hasNextService())
throw new NoSuchElementException();
String cn = nextName;
nextName = null;
Class<?> 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
}