Progress and information

[Frank van Heeswijk]

Dear all,

I am just a regular Java programmer here, that happened to have adopted Java 8 quite fast and thus got me interested in the core of a programming language.
I understand that Java 9 is just being started on and nowhere even near somewhere near a public alpha release.

What I hence was wondering, after seeing some public talks about what the direction of Java 9 are the following things:
1. Firstly; Is this the correct mailing list to ask such questions?
2. Can I find more about the general direction Java 9 is taking somewhere? (At least what is planned, it doesn't mean that it will make it in time)
3. What specific big topics (A few examples from Java 8 would be lambdas, streams and new date API) are up for Java 9?

Furthermore I have some more general questions which deserve their own context.

The first question is that I would like to contribute to JDK 9 if possible in some way, but I am nowhere near a maintainer of a popular project and neither close to being experienced enough to implement something in a language. What points would be doable though?

Secondly, correct me if I am wrong, there has been some talk about value objects, as opposed to reference objects, in possibly Java 9. Is this something on which more details can be given? I might be way ahead of time, but can be expect something like List<int> and is the planning to make int extends Object, or would it be more a low-level JVM optimization in which Integer (objects) would be treated just as regular int?

Maybe I shouldn't be asking the third point, but are their plans to break up with older Java code at some point in time? I honestly believe things like type reification would be very useful and it would be a great oppurtunity to fix some broken concepts (Clonable, Serializable) on a language level. Is there anything to be said about this? I do understand though that it is well possibly that this may never happen for Java.

Regards,

Frank