Everyone has their own priorities, but ValueTypes are huge.
Also, I don't think this falls under Valhalla (and I'm not sure if it's been committed yet), but the possibility of reasonable type inference in Java 10 would make me rather happy.
Also, I don't think this falls under Valhalla (and I'm not sure if it's been committed yet), but the possibility of reasonable type inference in Java 10 would make me rather happy.
Valhalla is pretty big. Goetz described it as pulling on a very long string. It's going to touch everything in the JVM, including reifing generics, although as I understand it, erasure of Objects may be here to stay for the language.
What's broken in the JVM isn't erased generics but instead runtime reflection that is a lie due to erasure. Type erasure though is definitely an example of Java getting something very right for the wrong reasons.
Furthermore, runtime specialization (as opposed to compile-time) would seem to require reified types. So that further confuses things. But you can definitely have reified types without specialization, which I think is the point that you are trying to convey.
Either way, CLR and C# did it a long time ago, and in the same time period when Java acquired its type-erased generics.