Frankly, I think the JDK is just sloppy here. Most of the existing
implementations didn't use @Override -- possibly because they were
introduced before annotations existed -- and later on, whoever implemented
the overrides of the Java 8 default methods decided to add @Override.
Part of it is that Doug and I are not huge fans of @Override. Is the gain in
safety really worth the added verbosity?
If we do decide to mandate the use of @Override in all of openjdk, then the
errorprone project has a bug pattern check for you, which will provide more
safety yet.
As I said, I don't think there's a rule that requires @Override. Thanks for
verifying this. :-)
I'm not proposing adding such a rule either. I agree, it adds little benefit, at
least for the JDK, and it adds clutter.
A quick grep reveals over 33,000 occurrences of @Override in the JDK sources.
That seems like a lot, but if we were to add it to all locations where it could
be applied, this might add hundreds if not thousands more occurrences. I'm not
sure it's worth the effort to do either the additions or the removals that'd be
necessary to make things consistent. Oh well.
s'marks
