explicit serialVersionUID considered harmful?

Question

I am probably risking some downvotes on this.

It seems to me that explicitly specifying serialVersionUID for new classes is bad. Consider the two cases of not changi

Answer 1

When you need to support long-time persistence via serialization, then you almost always need to use custom code to support this and need to explicitly set the serialVersionUID, as otherwise older serialized version will not be de-serializable by newer code.

Those scenarios already require a great deal of care in order to get all the cases correct, when the class changes, so the serialVersionUID is the least of your problems.

If you don't need that (i.e. you always serialize and de-serialize with the same class version), then you can safely skip the explicit declaration, as the computed value will make sure that the correct version is used.