A reminder of Project Lambda's scope

[Neal Gafter]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Alex Buckley <Alex.Buckley at sun.com> wrote:
> There is no need to lobby for mutable up-level variables, method
> references, exception transparency, extension methods, etc, since they
> are all mentioned in the strawman. The draft spec will get round to them
> in good time. Before anyone asks for a schedule, I don't have one.

We have an upper bound on the schedule based on (a) jdk7's now-extended
schedule <http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/milestones/>, which has the
jdk7 implementation "Feature complete" on June 3, and (b) Mark Reinhold's
commitment to devote a sufficient number of skilled language designers and
implementers to complete the work by then <
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lambda-dev/2009-December/000122.html>.
 We can work backwards from that, assuming that a penultimate specification
with all features described will be open to revision based on issues found
during public review:

2010-06-03 JKD7 "feature complete" in the master workspace
2010-05-21 Last TL integration preceding FC
2010-05-20 Last minute integration of project lambda implementation
2010-05-06 Final draft spec for all included features distributed for
(successful) 2-week review
2010-04-22 Semifinal draft spec with all included features distributed for
2-week review

This schedule is absurdly compressed (it leaves no time for an
implementation to respond to spec changes or code review), but I was just
trying to get an upper bound on how long we can expect to wait for a
feature-complete spec (including mutable up-level variables, method
references, exception transparency, extension methods, function types,
mapping to JVM concepts, etc).  It looks like we should expect the team
working on project lambda to publish a detailed specification describing all
the aspects within the next week or two.

This doesn't account for the possibility that Mark is unable or unwilling to
honor his commitment on behalf of his employer for some reason, for example
an Oracle decision to reduce the priority of work on core Java relative to
when Mark made the commitment.

Cheers,
Neal