Roger's workaround, as best I understand it, is asking a concrete object for its type. That's more or less what you have to do in Java, so there's that.

Lately, I've been playing a lot with Kotlin, which is to Java what Swift is to Objective-C -- a new layer of shiny goodness built on a shambling pile of old weird yuck. Kotlin is brought to you by the IntelliJ guys, who use it for building IntelliJ, so they're highly motivated to make it work and work well.

That said, Kotlin still carries warts from its Java heritage, much like Swift does from Objective-C. Notably, Kotlin only has reified generic types under very limited circumstances, namely only on declared inline functions, so they avoid the specialization confusion that C# has to throw compiler optimizations at. I haven't yet needed reified generics yet in my own hacking, so I don't have a good sense of whether Kotlin does it "good enough" or not.

One last factoid: In Java, when they added generics, they made the Class class be parametric on its own type. Which is weird, but it means that you can declare a method kinda like:

public static <T> T foo(Class<T> clazz, ...) {
}

That would be a function, parameterized on T, which returns a T, and takes a Class object that must be of the same type, which can then be enforced at compile time, and you subsequently know that it's safe to say "clazz.newInstance()" which will give you a T.

So I give them partial credit for small levels of elegance, but it's awfully nice when you never need to see a Class class.