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Comment by social_ism | Hacker News Reader

Feature soup is kind of meaningless. The open source community has whatever it needs now.

Many "alot" of java programmers in the US cant code to JDK8 already. I love the JVM but these Java releases are not being adopted on any real scale for a reason. They break things. And syntax sugar is boring and unnecessary for a crew of software engineers that have no real ethos surrounding records or any of these features.

They are just being rolled out to appease devs from other ecosystems. They will not form a new or better method for building systems or improve performance.

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For me, the biggest pain point with Java is the lack of optional chaining <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...> and nullish coalescence <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...>. I've noticed so many libraries and JDK APIs that try to solve this problem in such a limited way. What is `Objects.toString(thing)` other than a botched `thing?.toString() ?? "null"`? And that utility method is only limited to `toString`, what if you want null-safety for other methods? You have to write that yourself. It's silly. Adding optional chaining and nullish coalescence would be a wonderful QOL change. It'd reduce code complexity, and it would flatten code (ie, hide less logic behind tiny methods).

I do a lot of serialisation. You have no idea how much I'd love to be able to just to `data.set("thing", this.valueEnum?.name())` instead of having to do `data.set("thing", this.valueEnum == null ? null : this.valueEnum.name())`.

> I do a lot of serialisation. You have no idea how much I'd love to be able to just to `data.set("thing", this.valueEnum?.name())` instead of having to do `data.set("thing", this.valueEnum == null ? null : this.valueEnum.name())`.

You may be already familiar with this, but mapstruct is a godsend package that easily beats any kind of optional chaining.

Introducing annotation processors will never be a godsend.

Disagree. They should not be the first tool to reach for, but they are basically just safe compile-time macros (mapstruct at least is compile-time only)

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