
Google, Facebook and others announce new operators in the Java programming language
- July 6, 2021
Google and Facebook are teaming up to develop new operators in Java, the company announced today.
The announcement marks the latest effort to add a new level of sophistication to the language, which Google announced last year and Google has been working on for several years.
“We have been looking for a language to support new types of operations in an operating system for a long time, and this is a perfect fit,” said Andrew Butcher, a Google executive who joined Facebook in 2014.
Google is releasing a new version of the Java Language Specification (JLS) for Java SE 7, which will include the new operators.
“This language is a huge leap forward in terms of its features, flexibility and general design, and it is also a great fit for Google’s mission of making the world’s most important data and search engine technology more open and accessible,” said Chris Evans, Google’s vice president of software engineering, who will be the lead developer for the new language.
Google has already begun working on Java for Chrome OS.
The company said that it will add support for the “smooth operators” language, but did not provide a timetable for when it will release Java SE 8.
Google also announced plans to work on the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for Android and other mobile devices, which is expected to be released in 2017.
“Android, which powers almost all modern smartphones and tablets, has a rich set of Java APIs that make it easy to add new capabilities to Android, such as the ability to perform image recognition, to handle text processing, and to perform voice processing,” Google said.
Google said that the Java platform has been a long-time target for Google engineers, and that its current roadmap includes work on Java SE, Java SE Embedded, Java EE, JavaFX, Java Server Pages, Java Embedded Streams, Java Microservices, Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and Java Virtual Platform (JVP).
“This is an exciting time for Java and its ecosystem,” said Google’s director of product marketing and product management, Chris Burke.
“In addition to the Java SE team, we are looking at many different ways to extend Java’s power, and we are very excited about working with Facebook and the JVM team to help build an open platform that is truly a next-generation platform.”
Google said that in the coming months, it will continue to work with the Jigsaw open source framework, which it describes as the next-gen JVM.