JDK 1.7 new features

[Roedy Green]

I was pleased to see some features is JDK 1.7 that I had been asking
for since JDK 1.1. I'm surprised at how little there is new in 1.7. I
guess the recession made Oracle really pull in their horns. It is
mostly just a little syntatic sugar in the compiler.

binary literals.
underscores in literals to make them easier to proofread
string case labels
catch can handle multiple Exceptions.

I would think the biggest priority for 1.8 would be unifying arrays
and generics. They should be compatible, even if it means giving up
type erasure.

 

[Roedy Green]

ANT with javac for 1.7 is issuing a warning message on every compile:

[javac] warning: [options] bootstrap class path not set in
conjunction with source 1.5

Any thoughts on why it is complaining?

 

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 13:47:37 -0700, /Roedy Green/:

ANT with javac for 1.7 is issuing a warning message on every compile:

[javac] warning: [options] bootstrap class path not set in
conjunction with source 1.5

Any thoughts on why it is complaining?

Likely because classes get compiled compatible with the Java 5
format, but then against the Java 7 APIs which may result in linkage
against APIs not present in Java 5, therefore lead to failures when
run in such JRE version.

 

[BGB]

I was pleased to see some features is JDK 1.7 that I had been asking
for since JDK 1.1. I'm surprised at how little there is new in 1.7. I
guess the recession made Oracle really pull in their horns. It is
mostly just a little syntatic sugar in the compiler.

binary literals.
underscores in literals to make them easier to proofread
string case labels
catch can handle multiple Exceptions.

I would think the biggest priority for 1.8 would be unifying arrays
and generics. They should be compatible, even if it means giving up
type erasure.

IIRC, there should be several new VM features now, namely the addition
of the invokedynamic instruction and method-handles, as well as several
new constant-pool entry types, ..., which were planned to be officially
made available for the 1.7 release (unless something has changed, from
what I read says they should be there).

they are mostly intended for aiding in the implementation of dynamic
languages on the JVM.

I guess maybe by 1.8 there will be lambdas/closures.