I've realised this by means of a wrapper. This way, the conversion is done without loosing type safety and with minimum impact on performance.

That class works for Collection, a List implementation would be very similar and maybe one day I'll write it. If someone else comes before me, please let's share the code.

A way to retain some type safety with minimum impact on performance is to use a wrapper. This example is about Collection, the List case would be very similar and maybe one day I'll write that too. If someone else comes before me, please let's share the code.