Yesterday Jonathan Gibbons, in his role as Moderator of the Compiler Group, announced that Neal Gafter has been voted in as a Member of that Group.

Neal is, of course, well-known to many for his prior work on the javac compiler while at Sun, for his co-authorship of the Java Puzzlers book, and most recently for his proposal to add closures to the language.

Neal is not the first non-Sun Member of the OpenJDK Community—several now-former Sun employees beat him to it—but he is the first person from outside of Sun to be voted in to Membership.

Welcome (back), Neal!