What should default interfaces be for?

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 13 March 2012 10:30, Patrick Wright <pdoubleya at gmail.com> wrote:
> a good option, which I feel is in line with what the Lambda team has
> proposed so far, is that default methods are necessary to allow
> lambdas to be used fruitfully with existing libraries, but that care
> is being taken to leave the door open to future improvements (post JDK
> 8) to the default method feature.
>
> Personally, I would prefer to see an absolutely rock-solid, performant
> implementation of lambda, plus associated JDK library extensions to
> use them, for JDK 8, and suggest that Oracle's time is best spent
> doing just that and not taking even more on.

To be clear, I have no problem with some of an enhanced full-blooded
traits-like feature being in JDK 9, but unless we are clear that is
the goal, then it is entirely possible that the minimal option will
constrain the future. (Examples include what the feature being added
now is called, and the verbosity or otherwise of the syntax used, aka
the default keyword).

FWIW, I'm like Lukas, potentially more excited about the potential of
a full trait-like feature than lambdas themselves.

Stephen