| Re: [eclipse-dev] Review, refactoring, cleanup/polish of all JEPs from Java 10 - 24 in ECJ |
Thank you Srikanth for sharing this update: it's great to see the systematic effort undertaken to review and refactor ECJ’s support for Java language features, and to improve overall quality across several areas.
Kudos to everyone involved in this long-term initiative!
_______________________________________________Dear Eclipse/JDT users,
On behalf of the Eclipse JDT team and the Advantest R & D team, I am very pleased to share that, the effort we undertook in late 2023 to review and refactor ECJ’s support for all Java language enhancements [*][**] from Java 10 till Java 24, is finally over - after 20 long months!
As a part of this effort,
- We reviewed the relevant JLS chapters/sections & JEP documents
- Studied ECJ’s support for these features, making many improvements in design and implementation
- Did extensive black box testing, white box testing, behavior compatibility testing against the reference implementation
- Uncovered over a hundred defects; Also combed through Bugzilla & Github issues tracker to fix outstanding issues - closing over a couple of hundred defects in the compiler in the process
The language features covered are:
- Pattern matching,
- Sealed classes,
- Record classes,
- Switch Expressions,
- Enhanced Switch statements,
- Local variable type inference,
- Nest based access control,
- Text blocks and
- Indy String concatenation.
This is not a big bang infusion of change – these improvements have been delivered gradually over the past several releases in 2024-2025 and the just published 4.37 M2 contains the cumulative changes.
Caveat Emptor: While due (and at times undue! 😊) diligence has been carried out, defects cannot be ruled out. Here then is a request for all interested parties to test 4.37 M2 (https://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/S-4.37M2-202507241800/) and report any issues encountered so that we can fix them in time for 4.37 GA.
Help us deliver a solid 4.37 release!
[*] “JEP 467 – Markdown Javadoc comments” was not included in this effort since it is not a “language” construct per se. We plan to review/refactor this feature implementation later.
[**] While this effort beefed up (only) the compiler support of these language constructs, we are aware that weaknesses and non-trivial shortcomings exist in other areas such as code assistant for these features. We plan to address these in future.
Thanks,
Srikanth Sankaran.
Advantest R & D team & JDT/Core team.
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