Checked exceptions (original) (raw)

Andrew Haley aph at redhat.com
Tue Oct 15 09:00:46 UTC 2019

On 10/14/19 11:45 PM, Ryan Schmitt wrote:

I'm curious to know what the current thinking is on checked exceptions. Is there agreement that the current situation is less than ideal? If so, how might they be addressed, and are they even enough of a problem to be worth addressing?

Opinions are divided, but when you ask experienced OpenJDK developers about their least-favourite Java feature, checked exceptions are likely to be high on the list. In hindsight, it would have been better not to have them, at least in this form.

However, it's hard to see a good way to transition away from them. I suppose we could simply declare exception specifications to be optional in some future Java release, but it would be substantial work for a lot of people and we'd have to very carefully review the compatibility implications.

-- Andrew Haley (he/him) Java Platform Lead Engineer Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com> https://keybase.io/andrewhaley EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671

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