Jonathan Gibbons

javac: plates, coins, and progress

As we reported at JavaOne, a lot has been going on for javac over the past year.

Under the auspices of Project Coin, various small language changes are being considered: strings in switch, arm blocks, binary literals, large arrays, and the diamond and "elvis" operators. Project Jigsaw is investigating the use of modules; JSR 292 is providing support for the "invoke-dynamic" bytecode, and JSR 308 will provide support for annotations on types.

In addition, within javac, we've been finding and fixing bugs, including issues in the type system, and improving the diagnostics that may be generated. We've worked to produce an ANTRL-based grammar for the compiler, and we've worked with the OpenJDK release team to release javac as part of OpenJDK 6.

Posted at 10:02PM Jun 12, 2009 by jonathangibbons in javac  |  Comments[2]