Hacker News Reader

Comment by saryant | Hacker News Reader

Immutable values can be safely shared across concurrent contexts.

You can create immutable classes "by hand". Just make all fields final and either primitive or reference to immutable type.

This framework just makes it a little bit shorter to type as it automatically generates some boilerplate code.

And you can also simulate any Turing-complete language using any other Turing-complete language. That doesn't mean it's practical to do so :)

As someone who programmed Java a couple of years, because work: it is quite doable, since there are now good collection libraries that provide mutable collections (e.g. Google Guava).

Of course, you cannot get the same guarantees that e.g. Haskell provides. Moreover, unless you return concrete types, that Map<> being returned by a method could be mutable or immutable (it's your guess ;), or hopefully in the documentation).

The problem is, as you say, it is quite doable, as long as you have internal access to all of the code. There's no way to ensure that, for example, a function actually returns an immutable map, or actually doesn't modify a map passed to it.

(And no, Collections.immutableMap doesn't.)

(And then there are problems with the JVM bytecode as well - do you know you can pass 2 into a function expecting a boolean? And sometimes it'll get treated as true and sometimes as false? The JVM is "wonderful" like that.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com