GitHub user cvaliente opened a pull request: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/3581
make Merger extend Aggregator I suggest that Merger<K,V> should extend Aggregator<K,V,V>. reason: Both classes usually do very similar things. A merger takes two sessions and combines them, an aggregator takes an existing session and aggregates new values into it. in some use cases it is actually the same thing, e.g.: <null, log_event> -> .map() to <session_id,SingletonList<log_event>> -> .groupByKey().aggregate() to <session_id, List<log_event>> In this case both merger and aggregator do the same thing: take two lists and combine them into one. With the proposed change we could pass the Merger as both the merger and aggregator to the .aggregate() method and keep our business logic within one merger class. Or in other words: The Merger is simply an Aggregator that happens to aggregate two objects of the same class You can merge this pull request into a Git repository by running: $ git pull https://github.com/cvaliente/kafka KAFKA-5648-make_Merger_extend_Aggregator Alternatively you can review and apply these changes as the patch at: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/3581.patch To close this pull request, make a commit to your master/trunk branch with (at least) the following in the commit message: This closes #3581 ---- commit c20cd6fc7fe5a7403584dc3e04f0b8412fa8db6f Author: Clemens Valiente <clemens.valie...@trivago.com> Date: 2017-07-26T15:07:55Z make Merger extend Aggregator ---- --- If your project is set up for it, you can reply to this email and have your reply appear on GitHub as well. If your project does not have this feature enabled and wishes so, or if the feature is enabled but not working, please contact infrastructure at infrastruct...@apache.org or file a JIRA ticket with INFRA. ---