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Filter a list by type by using manifests in Scala

Due to the type erasure in Scala I got problems when I tried to create a function filterType<T>(list: List[Any]): List[T] that simply filters out all elements in a list of type T. This is the naive implementation that I first tried out: 

object TypeFiltering {
  def typeFilter[T](list: List[Any]): List[T] = list.filter {
	_ match {
	  case _: T => true
	  case _ => false
	}}.asInstanceOf[List[T]]
  def main(args: Array[String]) {
	val list = List(1,2,3,"a","b","c")
	println("strings: " + typeFilter[String](list))
	println("bools: " + typeFilter[Boolean](list))
  }
}
/*
Output:
strings: List(1, 2, 3, a, b, c)
bools: List(1, 2, 3, a, b, c)
*/

What happened here is essentially that the type erasure mechanism that exists both in Java and Scala (but not in C#) removes the type T from the line 

case _: T => true
which just leaves 
_ => true
which will always match, obviously.

I consulted the very helpful Scala community at irc.freenode.net/#scala and got the suggestion that I should use the undocumented and still experimental Scala manifests. Jorge Ortiz has written a very instructive blog post about what manifests are and how you use them. I ended up with this typeFilter function:

def typeFilter[T](l:List[Any])(implicit m:scala.reflect.Manifest[T]) =
	l.filter{x:Any => m.erasure.isInstance(x)}.asInstanceOf[List[T]]
/*
Output:
strings: List(a, b, c)
bools: List()
*/
/ Comment