JEP proposed to target JDK 12: 325: Switch Expressions (Preview)

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Hello,

On 8/28/2018 5:21 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:
> I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what Preview is, and 
> is for, floating around.
>
> A Preview language feature still needs to be Done, to the same level 
> of Done, as a permanent feature.  The difference is that we have a 
> (short) "grace period" where we have a chance to correct serious 
> errors that have leaked past the usual process, without having to pay 
> the Incompatibility Penalty.  With our new cadence, I expect that most 
> non-trivial language features will go through the Preview mechanism 
> going forward.  This does not mean they are experimental, or of lower 
> quality, or have had less thought put into them.  But, it does 
> sometimes happen that we discover unexpected interactions only after 
> things have been tried by a broader audience, and for this, Preview 
> gives us a short window to correct such issues if they are found early 
> enough.

[snip]

I'll again [1] offer an example of the benefit of having a grace period 
of some sort for developing language changes. Back during Project Coin, 
the initial production-ready, well-tested, and fully-spec'ed 
implementation of try-with-resources threw a NullPointerException if the 
resource being managed was null. Five months after builds with this 
implementation were available, we received compelling feedback that it 
would be better for the try-with-resources statement to ignore a null 
resource.

We consciously considered what to do about nulls at the beginning, but 
in response to feedback from experience using the feature, we changed 
our minds. The release schedule of JDK 7 accommodated changing the null 
handing, but we would have preferred the feedback sooner of course. If 
we had received the feedback a few months later than we did, we would 
have faced the unattractive choice of keeping a suboptimal design or 
breaking behavioral compatibility of a language feature.

Under the new six month release cadence, the preview language feature 
mechanism both provides additional time for developers to provide 
feedback and for the language development team to act on it.

-Joe

[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-dev/2018-January/000547.html