Why doesn't Java allow overriding of static methods?

java static overriding static-methods
sgokhales picture sgokhales · Feb 8, 2010 · Viewed 270.1k times · Source

Why is it not possible to override static methods?

If possible, please use an example.

Answer

Nathan Hughes picture Nathan Hughes · Feb 8, 2010

Overriding depends on having an instance of a class. The point of polymorphism is that you can subclass a class and the objects implementing those subclasses will have different behaviors for the same methods defined in the superclass (and overridden in the subclasses). A static method is not associated with any instance of a class so the concept is not applicable.

There were two considerations driving Java's design that impacted this. One was a concern with performance: there had been a lot of criticism of Smalltalk about it being too slow (garbage collection and polymorphic calls being part of that) and Java's creators were determined to avoid that. Another was the decision that the target audience for Java was C++ developers. Making static methods work the way they do had the benefit of familiarity for C++ programmers and was also very fast, because there's no need to wait until runtime to figure out which method to call.

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