Hyphenated Keywords and Unsigned Primitive Types

[Brian Goetz]

Yes, many people would be thrilled to see the addition of unsigned 
primitives.  (And the ML community would be thrilled to see half-floats, 
and the vector folks would love to see 128/256/512-bit "superlongs").

Unfortunately, it is not the lack of a surface syntax that is the 
primary impediment to adding new primitives; it's the JVM type system 
itself.  The JVM provides the same eight primitive types as the Java 
language, as well as reference types.  So, what would we translate them 
to?  If we erase them to int, we have a problem; you couldn't overload

     m(int x) { }
     m(unsigned int x) { }

because they'd have the same VM type signature.  "Language fictions" 
like this are sometimes a good move, but I suspect that this would only 
make people happy in the short term, and lead to confusion and 
complexity the day after that.  And if we translate them to references, 
we have the performance problem that everything is boxed.

If you look at the bytecode set:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_bytecode_instruction_listings

You'll see that many bytecodes are dedicated to primitive type 
operations (iadd, iload, dmul, dload, etc).  And there's not room to add 
the bytecodes we'd need for all the new primitive types.

This problem is one of the motivations for doing Valhalla -- to allow 
new types to be written that have the runtime behavior of primitives, 
but the user-definability of classes.  Valhalla is a very deep cut -- 
all the way down to the metal -- but by the time we're done, we'll be 
able to write unsigned int (and others) as library classes (with a 
sprinkling of intrinsification for arithmetic.)


On 1/13/2019 8:27 PM, Jacob Glickman wrote:
> Just throwing in my two cents on Brian's recent proposal regarding
> hyphenated keywords.
>
> I think their addition to the language would be a great idea, and I'd like
> to use this opportunity to revive discussion regarding unsigned primitive
> types in Java, as I think hyphenated keywords would suit them perfectly:
>
> `unsigned-int`, `unsigned-long`, etc.
>
> I'm curious if anything else has changed since the last time unsigned
> primitive types were discussed that would warrant their addition to the
> language.
>
> - Jacob Glickman