[FEATURE] @NotYetImplemented Annotation

[mintdaniel42]

When developing software, we often have methods that have not yet been implemented. Most of them have a return value that needs to be returned. Of course it is possible to just let the program return null, but that could crash the whole program.

public int calculateScore() {
  return null;
}

So what else can we do when we need to make a return statement?
We can simply throw an exception.

public int calculateScore() {
  throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
}

It can be annoying during development to have to switch back and forth between the code we're working on and the throw statement, because it won't compile if a throw statement prevents further code from executing.

public int calculateScore() {
  throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
  int a = 10;
  int b = 32;
  return a + b;
}

What if we could just annotate a method with @NotYetImplemented and Lombok would replace all existing code inside the function with an exception?

@NotYetImplemented
public int calculateScore() {
  int a = 10;
  int b = 32;
  return a + b;
}

would be replaced by

@NotYetImplemented
public int calculateScore() {
  throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
}

We could even modify the exception class to use our own exceptions

@NotYetImplemented(exception = NotYetImplementedException.class)
public int calculateScore() {
  throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
}

When using BuildConfig plugins, we could even specify to generate the throw statement only when a special flag is set

@NotYetImplemented(flag = BuildConfig.production)
public int calculateScore() {
  throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
}