On 01/15/2015 03:24 PM, Thomas Neidhart wrote:
On 01/08/2015 12:34 PM, Gilles wrote:
Hi.
Raising this issue once again.
Are we going to upgrade the requirement for the next major release?
[ ] Java 5
[x] Java 6
[x] Java 7
[ ] Java 8
[ ] Java 9
A while ago I thought that it would be cool to switch to Java 7/8 for
some of the nice new features (mainly fork/join, lambda expressions and
diamond operator, the rest is more or less unimportant for math imho).
But after some thoughts I think they are not really needed for the
following reasons:
* the main focus of math is on developing high-quality, well tested and
documented algorithms, the existing language features are more than
enough for this
* coming up with multi-threaded algorithms might be appealing but it is
also hard work and I wonder if it really makes sense in the times of
projects like mahout / hadoop / ... which aim for even better scalability
Creating thread safe classes / algorithms has traditionally been "Tricky".
With Java 8 parallel streams processing concurrency is a lower hanging fruit. For
example (Taken from http://winterbe.com/posts/2014/07/31/java8-stream-tutorial-examples/):
|=================================
Integer ageSum = persons
.parallelStream()
.reduce(0,
(sum, p) -> {
System.out.format("accumulator: sum=%s; person=%s\n", sum, p);
return sum += p.age;
},
(sum1, sum2) -> {
System.out.format("combiner: sum1=%s; sum2=%s\n", sum1, sum2);
return sum1 + sum2;
});
// accumulator: sum=0; person=Pamela
// accumulator: sum=0; person=David
// accumulator: sum=0; person=Max
// accumulator: sum=0; person=Peter
// combiner: sum1=18; sum2=23
// combiner: sum1=23; sum2=12
// combiner: sum1=41; sum2=35
|
|=================================
Less boilerplate, easier to read code, that's more efficient. Java 8
encourages making use of the fluid functional programming internally that
that the newer APIs aim to provide "Externally".
|
Cheers,
Ole
