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this comes at the cost of boxing ints inside Integer, though.
So, if you ignore for a moment primitives types, whenever you have generics, everything boils down to a single method accepting Objects and returning Objects. What the JVM does is to do runtime profiling of what actually you are passing to the generic method, and generate optimized routines for the "best case". In theory this is the best of the two worlds, because like in general you will have a single implementation of the method (avoiding duplication of the code), but if you use it in an hot spot you get the optimized code.
In a way, it is quite wasteful, because you throw away a lot of information at compile time, just to get it back (and maybe not all of it) at runtime through profiling, but in practice it works quite well.
A side effect of this is this makes the JVM a wonderful VM for running dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, because that information is _not_ there at compile time. In particular GraalVM/TruffleVM and exposes this functionality to dynamic language implementations, allowing very good performance (according to they website [1][2], Ruby and Python on TruffleVM are about 8x faster than the official implementation, and JS in line with V8)
