Why is using a wild card with a Java import statem

Question

It is much more convenient and cleaner to use a single statement like

import java.awt.*;

than to import a bunch of individual classes

import java.awt.Panel;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.awt.Canvas;
...

What is wrong with using a wildcard in the import statement?

Answer 1

Among all the valid points made on both sides I haven't found my main reason to avoid the wildcard: I like to be able to read the code and know directly what every class is, or if it's definition isn't in the language or the file, where to find it. If more than one package is imported with * I have to go search every one of them to find a class I don't recognize. Readability is supreme, and I agree code should not require an IDE for reading it.

Answer 2

It's not bad to use a wild card with a Java import statement.

In Clean Code, Robert C. Martin actually recommends using them to avoid long import lists.

Here is the recommendation:

J1: Avoid Long Import Lists by Using Wildcards

If you use two or more classes from a package, then import the whole package with

import package.*;

Long lists of imports are daunting to the reader. We don’t want to clutter up the tops of our modules with 80 lines of imports. Rather we want the imports to be a concise statement about which packages we collaborate with.

Specific imports are hard dependencies, whereas wildcard imports are not. If you specifically import a class, then that class must exist. But if you import a package with a wildcard, no particular classes need to exist. The import statement simply adds the package to the search path when hunting for names. So no true dependency is created by such imports, and they therefore serve to keep our modules less coupled.

There are times when the long list of specific imports can be useful. For example, if you are dealing with legacy code and you want to find out what classes you need to build mocks and stubs for, you can walk down the list of specific imports to find out the true qualified names of all those classes and then put the appropriate stubs in place. However, this use for specific imports is very rare. Furthermore, most modern IDEs will allow you to convert the wildcarded imports to a list of specific imports with a single command. So even in the legacy case it’s better to import wildcards.

Wildcard imports can sometimes cause name conflicts and ambiguities. Two classes with the same name, but in different packages, will need to be specifically imported, or at least specifically qualified when used. This can be a nuisance but is rare enough that using wildcard imports is still generally better than specific imports.

Answer 3

1. It helps to identify classname conflicts: two classes in different packages that have the same name. This can be masked with the * import.
2. It makes dependencies explicit, so that anyone who has to read your code later knows what you meant to import and what you didn't mean to import.
3. It can make some compilation faster because the compiler doesn't have to search the whole package to identify depdencies, though this is usually not a huge deal with modern compilers.
4. The inconvenient aspects of explicit imports are minimized with modern IDEs. Most IDEs allow you to collapse the import section so it's not in the way, automatically populate imports when needed, and automatically identify unused imports to help clean them up.

Most places I've worked that use any significant amount of Java make explicit imports part of the coding standard. I sometimes still use * for quick prototyping and then expand the import lists (some IDEs will do this for you as well) when productizing the code.

Answer 4

• There is no runtime impact, as compiler automatically replaces the * with concrete class names. If you decompile the .class file, you would never see import ...*.

• C# always uses * (implicitly) as you can only using package name. You can never specify the class name at all. Java introduces the feature after c#. (Java is so tricky in many aspects but it's beyond this topic).

• In Intellij Idea when you do "organize imports", it automatically replaces multiple imports of the same package with *. This is a mandantory feature as you can not turn it off (though you can increase the threshold).

• The case listed by the accepted reply is not valid. Without * you still got the same issue. You need specify the pakcage name in your code no matter you use * or not.

Answer 5

The most important one is that importing java.awt.* can make your program incompatible with a future Java version:

Suppose that you have a class named "ABC", you're using JDK 8 and you import java.util.*. Now, suppose that Java 9 comes out, and it has a new class in package java.util that by coincidence also happens to be called "ABC". Your program now will not compile on Java 9, because the compiler doesn't know if with the name "ABC" you mean your own class or the new class in java.awt.

You won't have that problem when you import only those classes explicitly from java.awt that you actually use.

Resources:

Java Imports

Answer 6

In DDD book

In whatever development technology the implementation will be based on, look for ways of minimizing the work of refactoring MODULES . In Java, there is no escape from importing into individual classes, but you can at least import entire packages at a time, reflecting the intention that packages are highly cohesive units while simultaneously reducing the effort of changing package names.

And if it clutters local namespace its not your fault - blame the size of the package.