[records] A link between record component and a getter method

Tagir Valeev amaembo at gmail.com
Wed Sep 25 16:01:01 UTC 2019


Hello!

JLS for records says that record component getter is named in the same
way as the corresponding field, and this is completely fine for Java
language. However it's unclear for me which approach is best for the
JVMS. I see several options:

- No direct link between record component and the corresponding getter
method at all. A class is free to have an arbitrary named getter or
provide no getter at all. Reflection API believes that there's a
getter named after the record component and may fail for custom
generated classes, but otherwisely these classes work fine.
- Strict requirement that a class must contain a method named exactly
like a record component and having no parameters and exactly the same
return type as the record component type, otherwise the class
verification fails.
- Flexible link: a record component has a new required attribute like
"Getter" which links an arbitrarily named method which has no
parameters and exactly the same return type as the record component
type.

The latter option may be more friendly for JVM languages other than
Java: they may also produce class files with the record components
linking them to the getter names which are traditionally generated in
given language for data classes or case classes (usually "getName" for
"name" component, etc.). In this case both bytecode analysis tools and
reflection-based frameworks could process Java records and non-Java
data-classes/case-classes uniformly.

What do you think?

With best regards,
Tagir Valeev.


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