[Explicit]

Lambdas really aren't a big change tbh, and it's not a change at all when it comes to functionality. The only difference is syntax and afaik (haven't read any info on JVM 1.8 ) it compiles down to almost the same thing.

They actually compile down to something significantly different to the equivalent anonymous inner class.  In 1.8, javac makes use of the invokedynamic JVM instruction, which was introduced for scripting languages.

I wrote up a bit about it here, from the point of view of decompilation.

http://www.benf.org/other/cfr/java8lambdas.html

I see, maybe I might start using them now thanks to this benefit.