Last night I attended a meetup of the Chicago Java User’s Group where I got to hear a talk by Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect at Oracle. Here are some exciting tidbits that he shared:

  • Java is planning to go to a twice a year release cadence, in March and October. This will allow smaller features to get into developers’ hands more quicker instead of “sitting in a repo gathering dust” as Brian said. Java 10 will be released in March 2018.
  • the intro of the var keyword and Local-Variable Type Inference
  • the introduction of a “data class” which is similar to the Scala case class, inspiried by algebraic data types
  • the upgrade of switch from a statement to an expression (aka has a return value)
  • new switch will incorporate pattern matching, just like Scala’s match. This means it goes from O(n) linear time on a switch statement, to o(1) hash-table performance while pattern matching.
  • new switch will also do “deconstruction” which is unapply in Scala. Basically, match an object against a pattern, extract a value from the object, and bind the value to a new local variable.
  • it also seemed like the famous Scala “that sign that means that thing over there”, _, will be making an appearance in the new switch

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TL;DR - Java is going to be incorporating some of the best parts of the Scala language (case class, match) in upcoming releases.