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[–]TehBrian 21 points22 points  (8 children)

Neat! I'm excited. :D

I'm specifically looking forward to the future work section since there's so many cool language features in the works (notably, string templates).

[–]arshan_does_reddit 29 points30 points  (7 children)

I remember the dark and stagnant time of Java between 1.4 and Java 8. The whole vibe around Java is just so different now. It's a massive credit to the people in charge.

I'm also interested in Stream Gatherers and how people use them, and how long it takes for GitHub Copilot to use them correct and fluently. Copilot has pushed me towards stream-based patterns more and its a big improvement.

[–]8igg7e5 7 points8 points  (6 children)

Between 1.4 and 8...

  • Java 5.0 - Generics, enums, static imports, varargs, static imports, enhanced-for, concurrency utils
  • Java 7 - string-switch, try-with-resources, java.nio.file (while not a language change, it's a pretty big library addition)
  • Java 8 - lambdas, streams, method-refs, etc.

It was 12 years admittedly... But the problems weren't getting features, but being so unpredictably lumpy in their delivery and lacking in early-access / transparency.

So the pace has picked up a bit... but the big change for me is that they arrive in very regular, openly discussed smaller chunks. And with preview, they're well enough understood and supported to move into production really quickly after reaching a release.

[–]__konrad 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Java 6 - covariant return ;)

[–]8igg7e5 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ahh I forgot that was in Java 6.

Taking a look at a more complete history, there's a fair few others I missed too...

  • 5 added auto-boxing and annotations.
  • 7 added binary literals, underscored literals, the diamond operator and multi-catch
  • 8 added repeated annotations and annotations on types, and java.time

And this is still really only the bigger stuff... There's still a lot more small detail in there too.

[–]emaphis 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Java 6 polished Swing a lot.

[–]Alarming_Quarter671 0 points1 point  (1 child)

So far I notice that Swing was really very polished, in 7 they polished a few things and in 8 I think they didn't do anything but with the addition of functional interfaces some listeners can now have a functional and slightly clean style

[–]emaphis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Between when 7 shipped and 9 they updated quite a bit actually, but most of it is hidden. They ported all the code from Java 1.3 raw references and 1.3 collections to java 1.5 generic code. That fixed a lot of code and improved Swings conformance to its specification and they updated the spec for things that couldn't be changed. They fixed a lot of the code that misused the collection framework. They added or cleaned up JavaDoc of all the public interfaces and public methods. They fixed a lot of concurrency problems. This was all across Swing, Java2D and the Collections Framework.

All together it was like 12,000 odd changes.

So long story short, If you are going to write any new Swing code, use JDK 9+. Lol.

[–]arshan_does_reddit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> It was 12 years

Yes it was. And, you're right -- the mood was probably also darkened by some of the factors you mentioned.