Expanding the wish list
Apart from all of the new stuff in JDK 9, a whole new set of features is expected in future releases of the platform. Among these are the following:
- Generics over primitive types: This is one of the features planned for JDK 10 as part of project Valhalla. Other language enhancements, such as value handles, are already part of Java 9 and will be introduced later in this book.
- Reified generics: This is another featured part of project Valhalla that aims to provide the ability to preserve generic types at runtime. The related goals are listed as follows:
- The foreign functional interface aims to introduce a new API to call and manage native functions. The API addresses some of the drawbacks of JNI and especially a lack of simplicity for use by application developers. The foreign functional interface is developed as part of project Panama in the JDK ecosystem.
- New money and currency API (developed under JSR 354) was initially planned for Java 9, but was postponed.
- New lightweight JSON API (developed under JSR 353) was also planned for Java 9, but postponed to Java 10.
These are just some of the new things one may expect in subsequent releases of the JDK. Project Penrose aims to bridge the gap between the module system in Java and the OSGi module system, and to provide different methodologies for interoperability between the two systems.
The Graal VM is another interesting research project that is a potential candidate for subsequent releases of the Java platform. It aims to bring the runtime performance of Java to dynamic languages such as JavaScript or Ruby.
A chapter dedicated to the future of JDK discusses all of these points in detail.
