I see where you are headed.

The question now is: is the configuration known at construction, or is it only known when we call get() ?

If the former, then we can express it as a lazy field of some sort (perhaps one with a weird initialization action). But if the latter, that's no longer "just" a lazy field, I think. Would you agree?

Maurizio


On 24/09/2025 15:20, david Grajales wrote:
Hi Maurizio and Minborg. Thank you so much for the response. I will focus on explaining the part with the parameters for building objects. This scenario is not as unique at it may seems, I used a singleton because I thought it would be the easiest example but it's true it may not be the most representative. I will hold my thoughts until I test the new API. but I still would like to propose something. The supplier based factory requires to capture a reference to an external variable in case we need to set some parameters to create or compute the lazy constant, which can't hurt performance a little if used often.

var conf = "conf";
var foo2 = LazyCosntant.get(() -> {
    if (conf.isBlank()) {
         // do some validations
    }
    return new Foo(conf);
});

I think it would be worth considering adding a function based factory that accepts an object T (a configuration class to pass the parameters), and a function that accepts the parameter and returns the lazy computed value.

private class Bar{
   public final String confParam1;
   public final int confParam2;
   public Bar(String param1, int param2){
      confParam1 = param1; confParam2 = param2;
   }
}


var bar = new Bar("conf1", 42);
var foo2 = LazyValue.get(bar, s -> {
        if(/*Set some predicate for validation*/)  {
         // do something
    }
    return new Foo(s);
});

I think it's cleaner and safer (also a little more performant since the parameter can be inlined and not captured as an external element, and since deferred initialization is pretty much about squeezing performance it may be worth considering this). besides it may internally check for T not null.

Thank you so much and best regards.



El mié, 24 sept 2025 a la(s) 7:02 a.m., Maurizio Cimadamore ([email protected]) escribió:


    On 24/09/2025 11:38, Per-Ake Minborg wrote:
    > I think the other examples you show (albeit I didn't fully get how
    > they were supposed to work) would have issues regardless of whether
    > there were language or library support for lazy computation

    I'd like to amplify this point a little.

    Your example shows the use of a singleton -- an object that is
    constructed once, then stashed in a static final field.

    However, the construction of the singleton (getInstance method)
    depends
    on a parameter.

    This means that, effectively, getInstance will capture whatever
    parameter value was passed the first time it was constructed.

    Now, there might be use cases for this, but such a use case would
    also
    not be supported if using Kotlin's lazy, Scala's lazy val, or our
    LazyConstant API (all of them are equivalent from an expressiveness
    point of view).

    So, your claim that

    > this may indicate that a keyword or annotation-based solution
    could be
    > a better fit.
    Feels a bit off -- either the example you provided is not what you
    really had in mind, or, when you say _keyword_ you mean something
    other
    than a lazy-like keyword (but as Per explained, while there are some
    more obscure keywords in other languages that might provide more
    flexibility, the semantics associated with such keywords feels a bit
    ad-hoc, and surely not something we would like to permanently bolt
    onto
    the language).

    Cheers
    Maurizio

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