Saturday, August 1, 2020

Finalizing instanceof Pattern Matching and Records in JDK 16

Gavin Bierman has recently posted two approachable posts regarding instanceof pattern matching and records on the amber-spec-experts mailing list and both posts are thorough but succinct. I recommend that anyone interested in the latest state of these two Project Amber initiatives read these posts: "Finalizing in JDK 16 - Pattern matching for instanceof" and "Finalizing in JDK 16 - Records". Even for those not interested in the details, it is probably interesting to see the likelihood of instanceof pattern matching and records being finalized in JDK 16.

Pattern Matching instanceof Operator

In "Finalizing in JDK 16 - Pattern matching for instanceof," Bierman writes: "In JDK 16 we are planning to finalize two JEPs: Pattern matching for instanceof and Records." About instanceof pattern matching, Bierman states, "Adding conditional pattern matching to an expression form is the main technical novelty of our design of this feature."

The "Finalizing in JDK 16 - Pattern matching for instanceof" post talks about advantages of the instanceof pattern matching approach. Advantages discussed in the post include refactoring of a "common programming pattern" (checking for instanceof and then explicitly casting the thing checked with instanceof to the type it was checked against) to smaller code that is more readable. Another discussed advantage is the ability "to compactly express things with expressions that are unnecessarily complicated using statements."

Bierman also discusses scope issues, local pattern variable "poisoning", and how these will be dealt with using "flow scoping." About this, Bierman writes:

Java already uses flow analysis - both in checking the access of local variables and blank final fields, and detecting unreachable statements. We lean on this concept to introduce the new notion of flow scoping. A pattern variable is only in scope where the compiler can deduce that the pattern has matched and the variable will be bound. This analysis is flow sensitive and works in a similar way to the existing analyses. ... The motto is "a pattern variable is in scope where it has definitely matched". This is intuitive, allows for the safe reuse of pattern variables, and Java developers are already used to flow sensitive analyses.

The post on instanceof pattern matching ends with a discussion of the "Swiss cheese property" ("unfortunate interaction of flow scoping and shadowing [local pattern variables shadowing a field declaration]") and expresses the hope that IDEs will help developers to deal with these unfortunate interactions.

Records

Bierman's post "Finalizing in JDK 16 - Records" provides some nice summary descriptions related to Records. The first is, "Record classes are a special kind of class that are used primarily to define a simple aggregate of values." This is immediately followed by, "Records can be thought of as nominal tuples; their declaration commits to a description of their state and given that their representation, as well as all of the interesting protocols an object might expose -- construction, property access, equality, etc -- are derived from that state description."

This post covers the "implicit declaration of a number of members" of a Record from the Record's "state description." The post also provides a brief overview of why a developer might "explicitly [provide] a canonical constructor" and how to do so. About this, Bierman writes, "The intention of a compact constructor declaration is that only validation and/or normalization code need be given in the constructor body; the remaining initialization code is automatically supplied by the compiler."

"Finalizing in JDK 16 - Records" also discusses canonical constructor accessibility, @Override, and general annotations related to Records. The post concludes by mentioning that Records can be declared locally and explains how this is an advantage for an expected common use case of Records: "Records will often be used as containers for intermediate data within method bodies. Being able to declare these record classes locally is essential to stop proliferation of classes."

Conclusion

The two Project Amber initiatives of instanceof pattern matching and records will be welcome additions to the Java programming language. Although these features have been available in versions of the JDK before JDK 16 as preview features, it will be their finalization (hopefully in JDK 16) that will enable many more developers to apply them in production code.