Updates on JavaFX, Valhalla, Data Classes, and Java's Floating-Point

There have been some interesting posts this week and in recent weeks that provide more insight into the future of Java and the JDK.

JavaFX Removed from JDK with JDK 11

In the blog post "The Future of JavaFX and Other Java Client Roadmap Updates," Oracle's Donald Smith announced that "starting with JDK 11, Oracle is making JavaFX easier to adopt by making the technology available as a separate download, decoupled from the JDK." Smith provides a brief history of JavaFX and discusses other motivations for the decision to decouple JavaFX from the JDK.

The "The Future of JavaFX and Other Java Client Roadmap Updates blog post concludes with a reference to the March 2018 Oracle whitepaper "Java Client Roadmap Update." That referenced whitepaper describes "the Java Client" as "consist[ing] of Java Deployment (Applets and Web Start) and Java UI (Swing, AWT and JavaFX) technologies" and then "provides an overview of the current roadmap and recommendations for each technology." About Swing/AWT, this whitepaper states, "Swing and AWT will continue to be supported on Java SE 8 through at least March 2025, and on Java SE 11 (18.9 LTS) through at least September 2026."

Valhalla

Project Valhalla hosts some of the concepts and ideas I most excitedly anticipate for future versions of Java. I have long wanted reified generics (still only listed on the Valhalla Wiki page as "possibly other related topics" to be considered in the future), but also look forward to "value objects." I have written before, in the post "The Value in Project Valhalla," about what makes value objects so exciting.

In a recent post on the core-libs-dev mailing list, Brian Goetz wrote about how Valhalla might one day address "an obvious gap between primitive and reference types in Java." Goetz describes how Java makes it easy to add libraries, but that "the primitive types we have are fixed and we effectively cannot make more." Goetz states that Valhalla's solution to this gap is the introduction of "value types" that "are like classes" in some characteristics, but "are like primitives" in terms of other characteristics. He sums this up as, "Codes like a class, works like an int." Most of this was not new to me thanks to Goetz's and others' earlier posts and articles on value types. However, Goetz points out in this mailing list post a "now obvious" to me consequence of these value types: "Value types let us write new numeric (and other) types as library classes, and get the performance characteristics of primitives." This concept makes me wish we had value types yesterday!

Goetz provides a very rough idea of the timeframe for value types in a future version of the JDK. He writes, "Project Valhalla has been rolling for a few years, and will likely go for a few more until we reach the point where this is practical -- and more after that before value types can fit cleanly into the generic type system." This statement dampens my hopes a bit, but does seem realistic given the magnitude and broad scope of the changes involved.

The "Valhalla EG notes" dated 28 February 2018 provide insight to the current state of Valhalla.

Floating-Point in Java

The Goetz post on how Valhalla might someday allow Java developers to write "their favorite numeric type" as "ordinary user-written libraries" when not already "built into the platform" exists in the context of a mailing list thread about a request user request and statement that "the java language needs to be changed" in relation to "arithmetic underflow and overflow" and "arithmetic approximation" associated with Java's floating-point types. What caught my particular attention (besides Goetz's reference to Valhalla) in this thread is an excellent overview of Java's handling of float-point types provided by Joe Darcy.

In this mailing list message (which would make an outstanding blog post or article), Darcy concisely and thoroughly (hard to do at the same time) lays out the challenges associated with representation of and calculation using floating-point approximations "with pragmatic compromises to facilitate calculation on computers." This post is much more accessible to most of us developers than the 70+ pages of the classic article "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic."

Darcy also provides guidance on what to expect in future versions of Java's handling of floating-points. He writes (I added the emphasis):

There are no prospects for a fundamental redefinition of the floating-point semantics of the Java language and VM. It is possible a faster and looser mode will be defined at some point, but altering the default is extremely unlikely. Long-term, decimal-based arithmetic (and other kinds of arithmetic) may get better support as a consequence of the features in Valhalla.

The Darcy post is worth reading for its overview of floating-point computations in binary-based computer systems in general and in Java in particular. Darcy concludes the post with a paragraph on expected etiquette on the OpenJDK mailing lists.

Data Classes

In a February 2018 post titled "Data Classes for Java", Goetz "explores possible directions for data classes in the Java Language." Goetz contrasts data classes versus value types (such as pointing out that data classes have identity while value types sacrifice identity to reduce overhead). He also explains why data classes are preferable to tuples and to the "only syntax-deep" "compact syntactic forms for modeling data-oriented classes" such as those provided by Scala (case) and Kotlin (data). Much of this post is on considerations that must be made when designing and implementing data classes in Java.