This isn't correct. The atomic updater classes don't rely on generics to do anything. What they do is perform safety checks on every access to ensure you don't segfault your JVM, resulting in heavy performance losses compared to sun.misc.Unsafe.
Actually it is true (about generics and erasure) when it comes to AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater.
The check is likely to be around 1 cpu cycle since the branch is virtually always predicted.
It can be one mov + cmp + je in assembly, but it's not always the case.
It's an instanceof check, if the class of the field is final (or can be proven to be effectively final by CHA) then it's a null check follow by a pointer check. Theoretically, the null check can proved to be unnecessary, be fused with another or be transformed to an implicitly nullcheck but in specific the case of an AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater, null is usually a valid value (by example, null is used as tombstone in many concurrent data structure implementations) so it's usually more than just a getClass() and a pointer check.
From what I've read, until recently this wasn't actually the case for the field updater classes. Instead, Java does things like not trusting your fields' finality and not treating anything as constant. Let me see if I can find the blog post.
In this sense VarHandle also relies on generics when updating references, which is completely meaningless, just as it is meaningless to say AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater "relies on generics".
