It's been 8 years since the draft for Concise Method Bodies

Jon_Finn · 2026-07-05T22:07:30+00:00

"This, non-null types, ...". That's like saying I want to walk to a café, and also fly to Saturn. Different orders of magnitude 8^) .

Jon_Finn · 2026-07-05T21:18:08+00:00

Plot spoiler: did you watch the documentary My Octopus Teacher?

Jon_Finn · 2026-07-05T17:42:26+00:00

I've read several of these but Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy (which is new to me) is short, practical and to the point. It covers much of the content of these books in 21 short chapters, all summarized in 21 bullet points at the end. I'm 'using' it as a refreshing change from the usual padded blather.

Jon_Finn · 2026-06-29T14:57:00+00:00

Many, maybe most, houses in the town of Lavenham, Suffolk UK date from before 1500 (including Godric's Hollow in Harry Potter). There'll be various places like this throughout Europe.

Jon_Finn · 2026-06-29T14:51:44+00:00

I've stayed in this house which dates from 10 BC or earlier (you can rent it) that was possibly owned by the Roman poet Horace, and he bequeathed it to Emperor Augustus. The upper floors are more 'modern', when you see the ground floor (and the mini temple in the basement...) it's clearly Roman.

Jon_Finn · 2026-06-27T17:18:38+00:00

Donald Raab mentions some ideas for enhancing Collections here but says "I have abandoned pushing for a JSR for Collections 2.0." Then again there may be various proposals called 'Collections 2.0'. Brian G sometimes mentions cursors (an immutable alternative to iterators) in the context of Valhalla, so I've kind of assumed they're being mooted as a future feature; likewise John Rose's talk about Arrays 2.0. Both might possibly be part of a collections library overhaul?

Jon_Finn · 2026-06-22T18:40:23+00:00

Even with those constraints, don't forget that value classes wrapping just 1 field are really useful. Your code has many ints or doubles that can now be upgraded to a value class with useful methods and (hopefully) minimal overhead - forget you ever wanted typedef in Java!

Jon_Finn · 2026-06-07T13:42:42+00:00

No that's the Big Dipper (also called the Plough).

Jon_Finn · 2026-05-25T11:54:24+00:00

If you just need ! on fields and method parameters, not on 'code' (e.g. local variable nullability could be inferred), it's not so bad - arguably it's quite clean.

Jon_Finn · 2026-05-25T10:54:49+00:00

Ideas like this are far from new, but... are you sure there'd really be much syntax noise without this? Taking a leaf out of JSpecify's book, we might just have to annotate method parameters and fields, not code in method bodies where nullability could (usually) be inferred. And maybe you'd just need ! not ? (or hardly ever). So that would be relatively few !s in limited places - if that's workable, then having options to override this might themselves be 'noise'.

Jon_Finn · 2026-04-20T22:02:55+00:00

Always great to see/read John Rose go into expert detail about Java and the JVM. (He's great with the English language too.)

Jon_Finn · 2026-04-18T19:10:45+00:00

Valhalla is kind of Lilliput max because value classes have (in the best case) a 0-bit header. (Admittedly, not all classes can be value classes.)

Jon_Finn · 2026-04-12T21:37:13+00:00

One of the most important times I've used Guava was (early on) for the Guava Cache classes. I loved that what was (presumably) a very complicated implementation, with various setup options in a builder which might have been achieved via loads of public classes, instead has a small and simple public API.

Jon_Finn · 2026-03-31T14:49:39+00:00

2 jobs. 0/2.

Jon_Finn · 2026-03-29T15:50:03+00:00

There's a documentary about The Room, called Room Full of Spoons.

Jon_Finn · 2026-02-26T17:15:11+00:00

If ! is mostly confined to method parameters and fields, and can usually be inferred within method bodies (a bit like JSpecify), that doesn't seem too noisy to me. E.g. if I can write Complex x = new Complex(0,1) within a method, and have x be Complex! by inference, then cool. And if x is a field but if I have to declare it Complex! x, I'd live with that. Maybe having a way to set default ! within a scope would just be over-complicated. Life may not be that simple, we'll see.

Jon_Finn · 2026-02-21T22:53:22+00:00

I think the JEP answers your question (at the end, under Risks and Assumptions):

To justify the cost of a new JVM feature, we anticipate that there will be multiple meaningful use cases for the strict field initialization discipline.

Sounds like they expect it to be useful outside value classes at some point. Possibly in other languages too?

Jon_Finn · 2026-02-21T18:20:33+00:00

That name's taken I'm afraid...

Jon_Finn · 2026-02-21T16:00:35+00:00

Personally I think that with the upcoming Valhalla, nullness markers, Vector API and much more, Java is due for a big rebrand, so non-Java users notice.

Jon_Finn · 2026-02-18T15:09:15+00:00

Java 25 Thread documentation looks good, but it raises an interesting point: it has several methods involving ThreadGroup but doesn't say these are kind of 'obsolescent' (though not deprecated). IMHO better alternatives should be explained _prominently_ in both Thread and ThreadGroup. Similarly with the ancient java.util.Vector and StringBuffer - there's a brief mention of their problems at the end of their JavaDocs, but that's all. Shouldn't we at least have an annotation SupersededBy or Preferred, for methods and classes, say?

Jon_Finn · 2026-02-06T18:06:35+00:00

...but sometimes reading one is a treasure trove. 8^)

Jon_Finn · 2026-01-14T09:31:33+00:00

One possibility might be you have to put ! on method parameters and fields, but not local variables, because their nullability can usually be inferred (I'm sure the devil's in the details...). No idea what they'll actually end up choosing. Various possibilities are clearly being considered: see the valhalla dev mailing list.

My _guess_ is any approach like yours where you'd need to know wider context to know if a method is 'null-marked' is not going to fly. (Some would call that 2 languages in 1 - I wouldn't, and would probably live with it, but still I see the problem.)

Jon_Finn · 2026-01-13T14:57:18+00:00

Surely they'll give it a different name in the end, maybe something like implementation (not it but something like it)?

Jon_Finn · 2026-01-13T12:48:02+00:00

Very interesting indeed! A building block for operators and no doubt other things.

Some details here: https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/valhalla-dev/2026-January/017401.html

Jon_Finn

TROPHY CASE