Monthly Archive: October 2015

Scala as a better Java

This one is for the Java developers who are curious about Scala. Maybe you have briefly looked at Scala and you were deterred by what at first sight looked like ugly syntax with strange, incomprehensible operators, or you think you have to become a functional programming wizard to understand it....

Effective Debugging

There are different kinds of bugs. There are bugs for which the cause is hard to find, but once you find it, the problem is easy to solve. The cause of this kind of bug is most often a simple mistake in the code. The fix often consists of just...

Project Valhalla – Generic Specialization

Last week I wrote about value types, which are one of the new language features that are being investigated for a future version of Java. This time I’ll explain another possible new language feature being investigated in Project Valhalla: generic specialization. In Java, you can only use reference types as...

Project Valhalla – Value Types

In July last year, Brian Goetz announced Project Valhalla, an experimental project to explore major new language features for a future version of Java. Features to be investigated are: Value types Generic specialization Enhanced volatiles Possibly other related topics, such as reified generics The features in Project Valhalla are not...