Github user aljoscha commented on the issue: https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/5735 I think I'd favour the second approach because the default value is closer to where the return value is used. If it's define "far away" when defining the state descriptor it's easier for code to get out of sync. But I think both approaches would work well. Though I'm also a bit skeptical about adding the feature again unless a lot of people absolutely want it. I can see that it might be useful but in the past we prematurely added a lot of API because we thought people might need it and now we have a lot of legacy stuff that we need to keep (for example all the "source" methods on `StreamingExecutionEnvironment` and the various `write*()` methods on `DataStream`. Still not opposed, though.
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