October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
14 pages
19m
English
Content preview from What's New in Java 7Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Supporting dynamism
Java is a statically typed language — the type checking of the variables, methods and return values is performed at compile time. The JVM executes this strongly-typed bytecode at runtime without having to worry about finding the type information.
There’s another breed of typed languages — the dynamically typed languages. Ruby, Python and Clojure are in this category. The type information is unresolved until runtime in these languages. This is not possible in Java as it would not have any necessary type information.
There is an increasing pressure on Java folks improvise running the dynamic languages efficiently. Although it is possible to run these languages on a JVM (using Reflection), it’s not without constraints and restrictions.
In Java 7, a new feature called invokedynamic was introduced. This makes VM changes to incorporate non-Java language requirements. A new package, java.lang.invoke, consisting of classes such as MethodHandle, CallSite and others, has been created to extend the support of dynamic languages.
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