Type erasure

In programming languages, type erasure is the load-time process by which explicit type annotations are removed from a program, before it is executed at run-time.

Type-erasure semantics is an abstraction principle, ensuring that the run-time execution of a program doesn't depend on type information.

In the context of generic programming, the opposite of type erasure is named reification.

[1] The reverse operation is named type inference.

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