Records feedback from JAX London

[Stephen Colebourne]

I presented a talk at JAX London on Amber features today. Attendance
was not overly high, but I thought it was useful to briefly say what I
saw.

People were interested at first as all the stuff that would be
generated was described. Then they started asking questions about the
restrictions. (Quite a few actually).

Questions included:
- why not getXxx
- what about mutability
- will setters be generated
- what about overriding hashCode/equals

However towards the end of the questions, one asked "what is this
useful for?" followed by (paraphrasing) "I can't see this being useful
for any of my code".

Concerns did clearly go down the JPA route, where database state is
stored in additional fields in the object today. But it was more
general than just that, with the use case of being unable to cache an
expensive field clearly resonating, as was the question of whether its
worth converting any existing classes to records in a sourcebase if
only a few actually are convertible.

I don't pretend that this feedback is especially scientific or
actionable, but thought it was worth recording.

Stephen