Thread: ArrayList.get() Returning "Incompatible Type"

I'm trying to create a basic class that stores an array of Objects and returns them. I do not have a way of knowing how many objects I will need to store, so I am using an ArrayList instead of a regular Array. However, code that would work with a regular Array does not appear to function with an ArrayList's get() method. Instead, I get an "Incompatible Types" error when I try to return the results of .get().

Even after creating the smallest possible SSCCE, I still am not quite sure why this doesn't function:

public class EmptyType {
    int testInt = 1;
}

import java.util.*;
 
public class ArrayListTest {
    private ArrayList list;
 
    public ArrayListTest() {
        list.add(new EmptyType());
    }
 
    public EmptyType GetFirstIndex() {
        return list.get(0);
    }
}

Solved my problem perfectly, thank you. Only glanced at generics up until now, and didn't know they applied to a situation like this. I assumed that the type didn't matter since the compiler had no problems loading the ArrrayList with arbitrary different objects; I thought that I was the one responsible for making sure that I knew what type of object was stored in the list and only performing operations on that type of object.