Is operator overloading in the Valhalla plan?

[Stephen Colebourne]

Is there a plan for operator overloading in Valhalla? As far as I'm
aware there isn't a public plan, and I'm not asking for one in
response to this email. Instead I'm asking if a plan is likely in the
future and how it fits into Valhalla timescales.

I raise this because of the issue with the meaning of == on
Float/Double value types. Bitwise comparison is absolutely fine and
correct for a JVM-level sameness test. But it is *never* what a
developer wants when writing a business application, hence discussion
of alternative approaches such as normalization.

If == was spelled differently (such as an `Objects.same(a, b)` method)
then the recent debate would be irrelevant. But the current proposal
is:
- the only equals operator is spelled ==
- it works 100% correctly for numeric value types including
Float/Double except for the NaN edge cases
Given these two facts, == *will* be widely used as the equals operator
irrespective of the authors' wishes. Just as it is for Enum and Class
objects. This will inevitably lead to bug reports where == on two
different NaN returns false.

As such, I raise the question as to whether there is any kind of plan
or priority to provide an operator mapping to Object.equal() for all
types in Java, not just value types. If you can say that there is such
a plan, then the == on Float/Double issue mostly goes away.

Stephen