Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Tuesday March 31, 2009

Project Coin: The Call for Proposals Phase is Over!

Update: Added links to proposal for switch for all types and simple expressions and a link to a revised method chaining proposal.

Project Coin's call for proposals phase is now over! Thirty four days long, the proposal period included nearly 70 proposals being sent to the mailing list, 19 coming in over the last two days, and over 1100 messages on the list discussing those proposals and related topics. With the flurry of pre-deadline activity over, the more deliberative task of finishing reviewing and evaluating the proposals awaits. Including several sent in a few hours after deadline, the proposals received since week four are:

• Type inference for variable definition/initialization using the 'auto' keyword, Tim Lebedkov

• Simplified StringBuffer/StringBuilder syntax, Derek Foster

• language support for JSR 292, John Rose

• switch (...) instanceof feature, Jeroen van Maanen

• Simple Operator Overloading, Ruslan Shevchenko

• Conditional Statement, Matt Mastracci

• Enhanced while statement, Marek Kozieł

• Indexing access syntax for Lists and Maps, Shams Mahmood Imam

• Concise Collection Initialization Syntax, Shams Mahmood Imam

• open and close brace optional for single statement try, catch, finally, method declaration, Glenn Marshall

• abstract enums, Derek Foster

• Generic Specification by Method, Ron Thomas

• Allow the class literal of the surrounding class to be referenced with the 'class' keyword, Peter Runge

• Simply implicit method chaining (revised), Ulf Zibis

• Extend switch .. case statement for Object types and simple expressions (revised), Ulf Zibis

• Rethrows Clause, Mark Mahieu

• Collection Literals, Joshua Bloch

• Underscores in numbers, Derek Foster

• Templated Construction Expressions (i.e., Expressions Embedded in Strings), John Rose

• Glue classes based on Extension Methods, Marek Kozieł

• Improved declaration using final keyword of internal method variables and for-loop statement, Andrei Navodnik

• Sameness operators, Derek Foster

• Addition to Comparable interface, Roy van Rijn

• Accepting a subclass as an element type in a for loop, Jean-Louis Ardoint

• @OverrideAll annotation, Gabriel Belingueres

The figure below graphs when proposals were received; nothing like an impending deadline to focus the mind!

Sometime after the next for further consideration cut is made, I'll post some thoughts on and reaction to the call for proposals phase as a whole. This will not include a detailed analysis of why each proposal was or was not chosen; however, there will be discussion of common aspects of proposals that led them to be selected or not.