A reminder of Project Lambda's scope

[Neal Gafter]

Alex-

Given the lack of progress on project lambda evidenced over this mailing
list in the past couple of months, the previously published schedule appears
unlikely.  I am skeptical of Oracle's continued commitment to this project.
Either (a) progress has been rapid but kept internal to Oracle, in
contradiction with the previously stated goal to develop the specification
in the open, or (b) there has been no progress, in contradiction with the
previous promise to devote a sufficient number of skilled language designers
and implementers to complete the work within the published schedule.

I understand that priorities can change, especially in the wake of a
corporate merger, but rather than pretending that the previous commitments
don't exist, it would be very nice to be told which is the current state of
affairs.

Cheers,
Neal

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com> wrote:

> 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
>