Virtual extension methods -- a strawman design

[Neal Gafter]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Rémi Forax <forax at univ-mlv.fr> wrote:

>  forEach or map or filter are so common that I don't see why
> they will not be added to the JDK.
>

I can think of many reasons.  Here's one: there is a major design decision
about these kinds of methods that has been unexplored.  That is: are
high-order functions supplied with the JDK (such as map/filter) lazy or
eager?  This decision has an enormous impact on the shape of the ecosystem
surrounding the APIs, and is not to be taken lightly.  Making them different
on related APIs (e.g. making them lazy on java.util.Iterable but eager on
java.util.List) would be a likely disaster, but as far as I know there has
been little if any consideration of the impact of this design fork.  This
decision also has a large impact on the possible evolution of these APIs and
their use in concurrent contexts.