Testing Groovy against JDK 8 EA builds

[Jochen Theodorou]

Hi all,

Dalibor and Rory suggested I comment on how well Groovy works with 
jdk8-ea. I thought I write directly to the mailing list here to share 
the problems.

So I used 1.8.0-ea-b115 and run our test suite to give a short overview. 
Of course we have to look into those issues in detail at some point. 
Anyway, we get 31 (out of 6107) failing tests.

All failures seem to be related to default methods.

We have some helper methods we add to our classes and for example a 
class extending LinkedList gets a helper method stream() and tries to 
call it with invokeSpecial. The result is a VerifyError. The majority of 
problems are like that. Of course that means tests involving these 
classes have not been executed.

We get also several null pointer exceptions, which seem to be related to 
List#sort. We ourselves provide a sort(Comparable) method on Iterable, 
but that method returns a List. The default method List#sort(Comparable) 
is void and hides the Iterable one, thus the method will return null and 
subsequent calls on the result fail with NPEs.

Those name clashes are a bit problem here I must say. Sure, we can 
rename our method, but numerous examples out there use it. And worse, 
our method is not mutating, the jdk one is. I am not yet sure what we 
will do about that in general.

bye Jochen

-- 
Jochen "blackdrag" Theodorou - Groovy Project Tech Lead
blog: http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/
german groovy discussion newsgroup: de.comp.lang.misc
For Groovy programming sources visit http://groovy-lang.org