My take on what's good and bad with Java 7

Last week I attended a session about Java 7 with Thorbiörn Fritzon from Sun Microsystems. I want to share my view on what is good and bad with the coming release of Java.

Positives:

• G1 - the new garbage collector will make the JVM even better
• Compressed 64-bit pointers
• Modules - this could be the end of JAR hell
• Jigsaw - breaking the JDK into modules is a good move
• util.concurrent - this already outstanding package will become even better
• Null safe dereference - a feature that rocks!
• Invoke dynamic - a new bytecode instruction that will simplify life for dynamic languages that want to run on the JVM

Negatives:

• Late release date du to the inclusion of closures - October 2010 is what Sun is aiming for. Why not add closures into the language later and release what is available now?
• Not enough attention on the many-core architectures - how will Sun tackle this issue? We need a better thread architecture! Using 1MB for every thread is not feasible in the future.

Ridiculous:

• Switch cases with strings! Is this really needed? After 14 years of Java's existence I think we have learned to cope without it :-)