Absolutely not, they are not the same. Without generics, the compiler can't make any guarantees on the soundness of your code. Go will accept code that's inherently broken and that Java will simply refuse to compile. I like to catch such errors as soon as possible.

As for saying "they are the same once the code is running", well, duh, of course, but it's completely useless by then.

Although I very much like C# where generics are not elided, I think most of the value comes from the productivity from static analysis, and therefore Java generics cature most of the value. Perf improvement opportunities are great though.

That's not relevant to type safety, though. Haskell also has type erasure.