# Casts

Mypy supports type casts that are usually used to coerce a statically typed value to a subtype. Unlike languages such as Java or C#, however, mypy casts are only used as hints for the type checker, and they don’t perform a runtime type check. Use the function `cast` to perform a cast:

    from typing import cast, List

    o = [1] # type: object
    x = cast(List[int], o)  # OK
    y = cast(List[str], o)  # OK (cast performs no actual runtime check)

To support runtime checking of casts such as the above, we’d have to check the types of all list items, which would be very inefficient for large lists. Use assertions if you want to perform an actual runtime check. Casts are used to silence spurious type checker warnings and give the type checker a little help when it can’t quite understand what is going on.

You don’t need a cast for expressions with type `Any`, or when assigning to a variable with type `Any`, as was explained earlier. You can also use `Any` as the cast target type – this lets you perform any operations on the result. For example:

    from typing import cast, Any

    x = 1
    x + 'x'   # Type check error
    y = cast(Any, x)
    y + 'x'   # Type check OK (runtime error)