Static fields in specialized classes

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 16 October 2014 01:11, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:
>> While a private closed code base can potentially make the
>> change you propose when migrating to 10, an open source library can't.
>> As an open source author, I need the code I publish to be equally
>> usable across multiple Java versions. I can't write <any T> today, so
>> it won't work as desired in 10. The "refactor and you're fine"
>> argument doesn't work here.
>
> Yeah, this is a problem with every nontrivial new language feature; that's
> pretty much independent of anything we've been discussing here.
>
> The good news is that we're working on a separate initiative to ease this
> pain, which is felt by all libraries.  Historically the approach libraries
> have taken is a least-common-denominator one; this was generally OK because
> the platform had not been evolving all that fast, so 5 was a reasonable
> least-common-denominator for a while.  But now that things are actually
> evolving again, and people want to actually use the new features, this
> becomes important.  We see this with libraries that want to use lambdas as
> well, but also want to maintain a single binary artifact.  So, stay tuned.

Cool. I look forward to the next rabbit out of the hat (but obviously
it can make it hard for us outsiders to comment on things as they
currently stand).

Stephen