Thanks Joe. Ok, so deprecations are basically a super-regulated way to achieve a certain amount of backwards incompatibility without breaking Java's core promise?
On Mon, Dec 2, 2024, 11:17 PM Joseph D. Darcy <[email protected]> wrote: > There is a policy for managing deprecations: > > https://openjdk.org/jeps/277 > > Most the incompatible step, actually removing the declaration in question, > if it occurs at all, would only occur after a warning period. > > HTH, > > -Joe > On 12/2/2024 6:24 PM, David Alayachew wrote: > > As a data point of one, we use all of the abovementioned constants > regularly for my day job. In total, we have maybe a couple thousand > instances of that constant being referenced. Ripping out wouldn't be too > painful as long as I was told exactly what the replacements were, but I > wouldn't be thrilled with it. > > Also, wouldn't this qualify as a backwards-incompatible change? > > On Mon, Dec 2, 2024, 8:32 PM Joseph D. Darcy <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hmm. I understand the motivation here and the asymmetry with the integral >> types, but on the whole I don't think deprecating {Float, Double}.MIN_VALUE >> and recommending use of a differently-named field with the same value would >> be a net improvement. >> >> -Joe >> On 12/2/2024 3:17 PM, Éamonn McManus wrote: >> >> At Google, we've had several issues over the years relating to >> Double.MIN_VALUE. People have not unreasonably supposed that >> Double.MIN_VALUE has the same relationship to Double.MAX_VALUE as >> Integer.MIN_VALUE has to Integer.MAX_VALUE. So they think that >> Double.MIN_VALUE is the (finite) negative number of largest magnitude, >> rather than the positive number of smallest magnitude. We're currently >> thinking of adding a constant MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE to Guava's Doubles >> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://guava.dev/releases/snapshot-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/primitives/Doubles.html__;!!ACWV5N9M2RV99hQ!PaT7OCGf7CncxF09sKLO4p39KkraAtzbBbvnOR8O8r2x6Z0e1zru8BqG9LGItQtyxAQkQc8A12DanwunC_ZxkNGO$> >> class >> and having static analysis that suggests using that instead of >> Double.MIN_VALUE, if that is indeed what you meant, or of course using >> -Double.MAX_VALUE if *that* is what you meant. >> >> A few JDK and JavaFX bugs show that Google engineers are not the only >> ones to be confused by this: >> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-4218647 >> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8092698 >> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8156186 >> >> So we also wonder if it would make sense to deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE >> itself and introduce Double.MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE with the same meaning. >> Obviously the same thing would apply to Float. >> >>
