Feedback and comments on ARM proposal (original) (raw)

Tim Peierls tim at peierls.net
Sat Mar 21 09:54:02 PDT 2009

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> wrote:

What about the magic marker interface (if you'll pardon my wordplay)? This may be difficult to specify.

There are spec issues to resolve with the magic package approach, too: What do you do if an interface type extends two or more interfaces from java.lang.auto? Probably not hard to find reasonable answers, but you could say the same about the magic marker approach.

I think the hard question is how much extensibility to allow up front. Magic Marker would make language libertarians happy, possibly at the risk of increased abuse of ARM. Magic Package is the conservative response; it focuses on the known problems, while preventing all but the very determined from creating their own auto types (with bootclasspath trickery).

I suppose Magic Package doesn't rule out later on granting new magic powers to types in java.lang.auto, including, say, the magic marker power.

--tim

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