[External] : Re: Minor improvement to anonymous classes

[Brian Goetz]

> Another option that gets some of the benefit and doesn't require a 
> spec change is to omit the reference to the enclosing instance if it 
> is unused. We've been doing that successfully for a few years at 
> Google. There was some minor compatibility impact to code using 
> reflection to access the synthetic field that stores the reference to 
> the enclosing instance, but that was very rare, and the benefit is 
> that it avoids some memory leaks.

The people who would complain are in a pretty weak position:

  - The field is private and synthetic; you shouldn't be reflecting on 
it at all;
  - The field name is an implementation detail of the compiler, and not 
specified, so you shouldn't even pretend you know its name;
  - If its your class, the easy thing to do is add an accessor, so the 
only people who would complain are those that are breaking into classes 
they don't control.

I think it is reasonable for the language to infer whether the enclosing 
instance is "captured" by the inner class or not, and that's consistent 
with how lambdas behave.