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I was thinking of building a tool through which we can have Named Parameters in Java 8+. I am looking for approaches on how to move forward with this. Here's what I have thought of so far,

  1. Writing a compiler plugin which rewrites the method arranging and matching the parameters. In case it is not able to do so, it will throw a well defined exception. Caveat is I would also need to write extensions for IDEs so it does not show as a compile error in IDE.
  2. Writing a buildscript which does the same as above, but does it pre-compilation. We still have the same problem as above and on top, I would have to write for multiple build systems.
  3. Use AOP and use @Named annotations to specify names. IntelliJ and Eclipse both support aop compilers so IDE support should not be an issue. However this adds an extra overhead of adding AOP framework as a dependency.

There might also be some way to leverage Kotlin over here, but I am still exploring that.Looking forward to some ideas that I am completely unaware of as well as feasibility of what I have suggested.

I am not sure if opening a JEP would help as a proposal in 2015 was shot down.

FYI, I am not looking for answers/comments like why not switch to Kotlin. The point of this question is to know how feasible it is to implement this in Java, without changing the JDK itself.

Ryan M
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Adwait Kumar
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  • How would you handle parameters that weren't passed?  There's a reason why named parameters and default parameters are features that tend to go together.  (Personally, I jumped ship from Java to Kotlin.  It's a very easy jump, and I'd recommend everyone take a look at it.) – gidds May 10 '20 at 23:43
  • That's not the point, I know you can switch to Kotlin, the point of this question is how do you get it in Java ? How would you handle parameters that weren't passed? Fail compilation. – Adwait Kumar May 11 '20 at 06:19

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