As you might remember from the EG meeting, we have toyed with a notion
of "method builders" which would be a more declarative way to declare
template-izable methods. The intent all along was that, once we have
such a mechanism, records would just be a consumer of such a mechanism.
That said, such a mechanism is bigger both from a technical perspective
and a bikeshed perspective. 90% of the current OO-ceremony-pain is in
ctors, Object methods, and accessors. So my preference would be to nail
down the semantics of data classes first, and then explore whether it
makes sense to surface a more general mechanism.
On 12/4/2017 8:34 AM, Remi Forax wrote:
Ok,
record/data class currently provides getters and toString/equals/hashCode, what
if i want to add a compareTo.
In Haskell, it's easy, one can use 'deriving', in Java, it can be written that
way,
record Point(int x, int y) implements Comparable<Point>
deriving equals, hashCode, toString, compareTo;
For the compiler, the method exists in the supertypes, so the signature of the
method can be computed from the super types,
after each generated method use an invokedynamic with the same meta protocol (a
list of getters),
so if by convention "equals", "hashCode", "toString", "compareTo" are the names
of some bootstrap methods in a class DerivingMetaFactory,
it can be trivial for a JDK developer to add a new bootstrap method without
having to change the JLS.
So my point is, that we can specify once how the compiler should generate codes
for any generated methods in an extensible way.
regards,
Rémi
