Start Hacking With Java 8

functr.blogspot.co.uk

37 points·magicSystem··14 comments

Yes, I know Java is behind every other language but speaking as someone who is stuck with Java in the workplace I heartily welcome these changes.

Even though the features lag behind some of the more 'flexible, newer' languages, its exciting to see some of these come down the pipe. After using libraries like Google's Guava, I'm anxious to see some more functional-esque styles get integrated into java.

Is this usable in Android?

I don't think so. It will be awhile before Dalvik supports the new bytecodes in Java 8. I'd like to know how long though.

edit: or new bytecodes from Java 7 which will be required for Java 8 features

There's no new bytecodes in Java 8. Lambdas will compile down to invokedynamic calls (jdk7)

Which will be fine once Android starts supporting Java 7.

You can compile invokedynamic into reflection pretty easily. Obviously you lose the method call optimization, but you can keep the syntatic sugar.

I would be very surprised if the backports folks didn't offer this within a few months.

Another nice addition (that will never happen) would be to make variable declarations final by default, and adding a var keyword to declare them mutable.

Also, pattern matching would be nice.

Wait a second, this is all starting to look a lot like Scala.

Lombok has 'val'. http://projectlombok.org/features/val.html

Lombok really brings some sanity to Java...

IDE can help here

The functional additions are very welcome and long overdue. The article also mentions virtual method extensions, which also look useful/necessary wrt binary compatibility.

.. no.

This comment does nothing but make you look ridiculous. Either discuss the article or don't.

Your comment just made my day :-)

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