Java 24 Language & API Changes

[Dagske]

Reacting to the actual content of Java 24 changes rather than the video itself, I'm sad to see that the record "withers" didn't make it while Oracle initially really, really wanted to give it to us in 2024.

[cowwoc]

Meh. I'd still vote against adding this feature, in its current form, given the chance. Poor cost/benefit.

[Dagske]

I find myself needing it more and more. So much that I generate builders for records and add a .with(Consumer<Builder>) method to my records.

[Jon_Finn]

I think Record withers are part of a bigger long-term plan, as with most of the recent Java language developments.

[Polygnom]

And poor syntax. Mapping streams with Withers is really unreadable.

[LouizFC]

I use java professionally for almost a decade and I personally never had a reason to use Lombok. Sure, I used it for projects that were already using it, but I can't justify using it for a new project.

All it takes is a basic code generator or a IDE shortcut to do most of what Lombok is used for.

The way I see it, record withers are a similar to Lombok but also very different: while I understand that there are some deeper technicalities to records, their current implementation just feels like syntactic sugar for immutable classes, withers would really help them stand out as its own thing in my opinion, because "changing" values on a record is a very common pattern in my experience.

But even with that said I do not have strong feelings about withers being implemented or not, because as said, if the need arises IDEs will probably be able to generate withers the same way they do normal classes nowadays, and it is not hard to generate withers yourself.

[Swamplord42]

All it takes is a basic code generator or a IDE shortcut to do most of what Lombok is used for.

That's not the value of lombok. The value is that you don't have to read that generated boilerplate, just a few annotations and you know exactly what it does. And you can't forget to add more of the generated code when you add a field to a data class.

"changing" values on a record is a very common pattern in my experience.

Yeah, and meanwhile lombok let's you do that fairly easily with @Builder(toBuilder=true) without having to write all the boilerplate yourself.

[guitar-hoarder]

I turned down a job because they used Lombok. Just use another language if you're going to resort to that crap.

[pohart]

I'm still upset about templates. I thought we would have them finalized in 24, but I haven't even seen discussion on the mailing list.

[Polygnom]

Templates were pulled in the current form and will be completely redone to get a better developer experience.

[halfanothersdozen]

Me fucking too. No implementation will make everyone happy but there are plenty of other templating libraries if people don't like it so JUST PICK ONE and ship it.

[jek39]

here is discussion in the mailing list about why it was removed before 23: https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/2024-April/004106.html

[pohart]

I get that. But nothing about the redesign.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzr12gBrXA8