What is the use and point of unbound wildcards generics in Java?

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An unbound type can be useful when your method doesn’t really care about the actual type.

A primitive example would be this:

public void printStuff(Iterable<?> stuff) {
  for (Object item : stuff) {
    System.out.println(item);
  }
}

Since PrintStream.println() can handle all reference types (by calling toString()), we don’t care what the actual content of that Iterable is.

And the caller can pass in a List<Number> or a Set<String> or a Collection<? extends MySpecificObject<SomeType>>.

Also note that not using generics (which is called using a raw type) at all has a quite different effect: it makes the compiler handle the entire object as if generics don’t exist at all. In other words: not just the type parameter of the class is ignored, but also all generic type parameters on methods.

Another important distinctions is that you can’t add any (non-null) value to a Collection<?>, but can add all objects to the raw type Collection:

This won’t compile, because the type parameter of c is an unknown type (= the wildcard ?), so we can’t provide a value that is guaranteed to be assignable to that (except for null, which is assignable to all reference types).

Collection<?> c = new ArrayList<String>();
c.add("foo");    // compilation error

If you leave the type parameter out (i.e. use a raw type), then you can add anything to the collection:

Collection c = new ArrayList<String>();
c.add("foo");
c.add(new Integer(300));
c.add(new Object());

Note that the compiler will warn you not to use a raw type, specifically for this reason: it removes any type checks related to generics.

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