Why don't Java Generics support primitive types?

Generics in Java are an entirely compile-time construct - the compiler turns all generic uses into casts to the right type. This is to maintain backwards compatibility with previous JVM runtimes.

This:

List<ClassA> list = new ArrayList<ClassA>();
list.add(new ClassA());
ClassA a = list.get(0);

gets turned into (roughly):

List list = new ArrayList();
list.add(new ClassA());
ClassA a = (ClassA)list.get(0);

So, anything that is used as generics has to be convertable to Object (in this example get(0) returns an Object), and the primitive types aren't. So they can't be used in generics.

In Java, generics work the way that they do ... at least in part ... because they were added to the language a number of years after the language was designed¹. The language designers were constrained in their options for generics by having to come up with a design that was backwards compatible with the existing language and the Java class library.

Other programming languages (e.g. C++, C#, Ada) do allow primitive types to be used as parameter types for generics. But the flip side of doing this is that such languages' implementations of generics (or template types) typically entail generation of a distinct copy of the generic type for each type parameterization.

^{1 - The reason generics were not included in Java 1.0 was because of time pressure. They felt that they had to get the Java language released quickly to fill the new market opportunity presented by web browsers. James Gosling has stated that he would have liked to include generics if they had had the time. What the Java language would have looked like if this had happened is anyone's guess.}