[records] Ancillary fields

[Brian Goetz]

For primitives, you can always force yourself to use Integer:

     lazy Integer i = f();

and make sure f() never returns null.  You can do something similar with 
a library class (e.g., Optional) for references.  So there are surely 
_safe_ ways to do it, albeit ugly ones.

I kind of prefer to have boxing like this be explicit rather than 
implicit; if the user thinks they're putting an `int` in their class, 
I'd like to be as transparent about that as we can.

You were willing to throw on null in the reference case; that can also 
be simulated by:

     lazy Foo f = requireNonNull(f());

Which isn't even that ugly or expensive.  So I suspect that this is less 
of a problem that one might first think, but I could be wrong.



On 4/18/2018 5:59 PM, Kevin Bourrillion wrote:
>
>     For instance fields, we have a choice; use extra space in the
>     object to store the "already initialized" bit, or satisfy
>     ourselves with the trick that String does with hashCode() -- allow
>     redundant recomputation in the case where the initializer serves
>     up the default value.
>
>
> I strongly suspect there isn't going to be any generally safe way to 
> do the latter.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/attachments/20180418/d38b24b0/attachment.html>