Looks like Joe Darcy has opened the floodgates for new language proposals in Java 7. He’s proposed an OpenJDK project to manage the process and he’ll be leading the process.

It should be interesting to see which language proposals are seeded by Sun. There was a set of small language changes [jointly proposed](http://www.bejug.org/newsletter/05/index.html) by the BeJUG and SouJava user groups by Google (sorry, the user group proposal was the closures one) in November 2007 that specified:

• Type inference
• Enum comparison
• String switch
• Chained invocation
• Extension methods
• Improved catch/rethrow

It’s not clear what, if anything, happened to the original JSR proposal – it was never accepted and assigned a number to my knowledge. But I assume these proposals are potential choices as they came out of some Sun / Google folks.

Language support for BigDecimal has also been bandied about but Neal Gafter has said before that it cannot be implemented while supporting backwards compatibility so I don’t think that’s an option.

I’m also assuming that the word “small” used in this project indicates things like closures and property support are out of bounds, at least for consideration in this project.