Serialization stability

[David M. Lloyd]

On 10/08/2012 12:26 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:
>> I disagree - anonymous classes were an oversight; just because one thing
>> doesn't work does not give justification to make more problems.  It's
>> more of an excuse.  I think we *can* limit serialization to named
>> references, and this would cause a better user experience
>
> No, the user experience in this case would be terrible!  People would
> simply not understand why the "stupid compiler" is forcing you to
> manually desugar lambdas to method references, why static and unbound
> method refs are OK but not bound ones, or why simple lambdas like s ->
> true will not serialize, or why things that are expressible today as
> serializable anonymous classes don't work as lambdas.
>
> (I am not saying that your position is not one worth discussing, just
> that to call it a better user experience is kind of silly.)

My experience with end users would pretty much uniformly give me the 
opposite expectation ("if this was going to break why didn't it just say 
so up front?").  If the compiler tells someone to do something, for the 
most part they just do it (or do the couple keystrokes it takes for 
their IDE to do it), and then remember for next time.  It's when things 
start falling apart in production for non-obvious reasons that people 
begin to feel like they've been screwed over.

-- 
- DML