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<div class="">This is an understandable question, and one that occurs almost immediately when someone says “operator overloading.” </div>
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<div class="">And, there’s a very clear answer: this is a hard “no”. Not now, not ever. </div>
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<div class="">Operators like `+` are not just “methods with funny names and more complex priority and associativity rules” The reason that Java even has operators like + in the first place is that _numbers are special_, and that we want code that implements
mathematical calculations to look somewhat like the math it is calculating. Numbers are so special, and so important, that a significant portion of foundational language design choices, such as “what kinds of built-in types do we have”, “what built-in operators
do we support”, and “what conversions between built-in types do we support” — are all driven by numerical use cases. In earlier programming languages, such as Fortran, the language design process largely stopped here — most of the language specification was
about numbers and numeric operators. </div>
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<div class="">Similarly, the only reason we are _even considering_ operator overloading now is for the same reason — to support _numerical_ calculations on the new numeric types enabled by Valhalla. (And even this is a potentially dangerous tradeoff.)</div>
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<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">It is a core Java value that “reading code is more important than writing code”; all of this complexity was taken on so that reading _numerical_ code could look like the math we already understand.
One does’t have to consult the Javadoc to know what `a+b` means when a and b are ints. We know this instinctively, because we have been looking at integer arithmetic using infix operators since we were children. But once you leave this very narrow realm,
this often becomes something that benefits writing code more than reading code. And for every “but this seems perfectly reasonable” example, there are many more “please, kill me now” examples. </div>
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<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">For sure, the restrictions we set will be constraining, and they will eliminate some things that seem entirely reasonable. And surely bad programmers will move heaven and earth to “outwit”
the “stupid” compiler (as they always have.) But the reason we are even doing this is: numbers are special. </div>
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<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">I realize this is not the answer you were hoping for. </div>
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<div class="">On Aug 21, 2025, at 7:01 PM, david Grajales <<a href="mailto:david.1993grajales@gmail.com" class="">david.1993grajales@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div>
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<p class="">Dear Amber team,</p>
<p class="">I hope this message finds you well.</p>
<p class="">I recently watched Brian’s talk "Growing the java language" and I found the discussion on operator overloading particularly interesting. I appreciated how the proposed approach allows operator overloading in a more restricted and safer way, by enforcing
algebraic laws.</p>
<p class="">This immediately made me think about potential use cases for collections—for example, using operators for union (<code class="">+</code>), difference (<code class="">-</code>), exclusion, and similar operations. However, since this feature is intended
to be limited to value classes, and the current collection classes are not value-based, it seems they would not benefit from these new operator overloading capabilities.</p>
<p class="">My question is: are there any plans to enhance the collections framework with value-class-based variants, so that they could take advantage of this feature? Or is this idea (or any other related to the use case) not currently under consideration?</p>
<p class="">I know this is still under discussion, I am just curious about this particular use case.</p>
<p class="">Thank you very much for your work and for your time.</p>
<p class="">Best regards, and always yours.</p>
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