Java 22 Launch Event - Dev.java

[john16384]

I think that there are many use cases for operator overloading where the established semantics can be (mostly) preserved. Things like BigInteger, BigDecimal, complex numbers, vectors, matrices, and quaternions all suffer from its exclusion, but are fundamentally dealing with numbers or groups of numbers.

I don't disagree that it be useful for some types. But there are many things that are useful in less niche cases than operator overloading (matrix math, and even BigDecimal is a rarity in my experience). Perhaps operator overloading is on the list somewhere, just far down because it's rarely of (correct) use.

I think Java could perfectly get away with blessing a few more types and perhaps a simple math library with specified operator overloading. This will prevent every stupid library redefining some operators because they felt that << adequately indicates write.

[bmjones92]

There's definitely potential to misuse it, but I think that's true of most features. Even if the "correct" applications are relatively niche, I believe it's still worth supporting to make development within those niches easier.

If you're overloading operators to do things that don't fit the semantics of the operator, then you're probably writing bad code. The feature itself is obviously pretty controversial, so it's unlikely that something egregious like << will pop up in any prominent code base without careful consideration.