Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Wednesday May 27, 2009

Project Coin: For further consideration, round 2

The first group of proposals selected for further consideration were:

• Strings in switch, Joe Darcy

• Improved Exception Handling for Java, Neal Gafter

• Automatic Resource Management, Josh Bloch

• Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation, Jeremy Manson

• Elvis and Other Null-Safe Operators, Written by Neal Gafter and submitted by Stephen Colebourne

• Simplified Varargs Method Invocation, Bob Lee

After due deliberation, and next set of proposals meeting the Project Coin criteria for further consideration are:

• Logically a combined proposal for better integral literals:

  • Byte and Short Integer Literal Suffixes, Bruce Chapman

  • Binary Literals, Derek Foster

  • Underscores in numbers, Derek Foster

• Language support for JSR 292 (wiki), John Rose

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

• Collection Literals, Joshua Bloch

• Large arrays (revised), James Lowden

All the selected proposals were reviewed and judged to have favorable effort to reward ratios and to preserve the essential character of the language.

Work should continue refining the selected proposals and producing prototypes. In particular, a unified proposal for integer literals should be produced.

Language change proposals not on the combined "for further consideration" list will not be included in JDK 7; there is no need for continued discussion about them on the Project Coin mailing list. Detailed rationales for why particular proposals were not selected will not be provided.

Final selection of the five or so proposals to be included in the platform will occur within the next few months.