Nope. It's just sugar. [1]

It's somewhat implicit in the JVM spec, but functions are always bound to classes as methods. [2] The only kinds of heap objects you can have a reference to are class instances and arrays. [3]

The lack of free functions is really only a minor inconvenience for language implementers. Clojure, for instance, just compiles new classes to hold functions as methods.

From a programmer's perspective, you can write lambdas, but again, it's just syntactic sugar over an inner class.

[1] https://www.happycoders.eu/java/main-method/ [2] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se23/html/jvms-4.h... [3] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se23/html/jvms-2.h...