LVTI Style Guide

[Tagir Valeev]

Hello!

Thank you for this post. I was thinking about tuning our IntelliJ IDEA
inspection "Local variable type can be omitted". Initially we enabled it,
so every local variable type which can be replaced with 'var' was grayed
out. Then Brian asked us not to do this, as many people just blindly apply
the quick-fixes the IDE suggests. Now by default we display no
highlighting, but quick-fix can be invoked from the drop-down menu. Still I
think that we may have some intermediate solution when 'var' is suggested
by default only in some places where it's applicable. My current thought is
to limit default suggestions to these cases:

* when the variable initializer is a new expression.
* when the variable initializer is a static method, and its containing
class is the same as the return value erased type.
* when the variable initializer is an instance method and its name is
"getXyz" where "Xyz" is the simple class name of the return value erased
type.
* when the variable initializer is a String/char/boolean constant.

More questionable:
* when the variable initializer is a String/boolean expression
* when the variable initializer is a conditional operator and both branches
are satisfied by any of these rules

Even more questionable (too much magic):
* when the variable initializer is a method which name is "getFoos" where
"Foos" is the plural form (according to English grammar rules) of the
declared variable name "foo" and type is either "Foo[]" or inheritor of
"Iterable<Foo>"

Of course, this list is preliminary. If you have suggestions what to add or
what to remove here, feel free to comment.

The main concern we have is that the default behavior might look confusing
for users: why var is suggested in one place, but not suggested in the
other. So we probably should not make this feature too magical. Instead it
should follow a clear list of rules which could be documented. Also there
are open questions, whether we should have three modes ("never suggest
var", "suggest var in some cases", "suggest var everywhere where possible")
or more fine-grained setting like additional levels to include questionable
cases or even set of checkboxes.

Please share your opinions on this! Probably there should be an official
recommendation from JDK team to IDE authors (not only IntelliJ) on whether
the 'var' suggestion is considered a good style.

Thank you,
With best regards,
Tagir Valeev.

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 1:15 PM, Stuart Marks <stuart.marks at oracle.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've posted a style guide for LVTI:
>
>     http://openjdk.java.net/projects/amber/LVTIstyle.html
>
> There has been quite a bit of chatter about LVTI surrounding the Java 10
> release. This has tended to obscure thoughtful conversations that
> programmers need to have regarding when and how to use `var` effectively on
> their projects. This document is an attempt to provide a head start in
> those conversations.
>
> Enjoy,
>
> s'marks
>
>