Project COIN

Project coin is aiming to find out the small language changes that should be added to the JDK.

Around 70 proposals were submitted in the period of Feb-27, 2009 to Mar-30, 2009 and discussed in coin developer forum.

Out of these proposals 5 or so are selected for including in Jdk7.

Some of the accepted proposals are -

1. Using Strings in switch

- Ability to switch on string values

2. Automatic resource management

- Having try like statement to declare one or more Resources. Scope of the resource is limited by that of the statement. When the statement completes normally or abruptly , all the resources are closed automatically.

3. Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation

- When the full parameterized type is obvious from the context, then the parameterized type of the constructor could be replaced with empty set of type parameters.

4. Simplified Varargs method invocation.

- Reduces the total number of warnings reported to and suppressed by programmers.

5. Language support for JSR 292

Some of the proposals which are considered but not accepted are

1. Improved exception handling for Java

2. Elvis and other null safe operators

3. Large Arrays

Mailing List : http://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/coin-dev

Blogs : http://blogs.sun.com/main/tags/projectcoin

Wiki : http://wikis.sun.com/display/ProjectCoin/Home

This project is sponsored by The Compiler Group