improved return type-inference: request for review

[Neal Gafter]

Maurizio-

Do you have a draft of the revised JLS specification that describes the new
behavior?

-Neal

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Maurizio Cimadamore <
Maurizio.Cimadamore at sun.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> this is the fix [1] for an outstanding javac/JLS inference bug: [3] and
> [4] respectively. Those CRs both have to do with recursive bounds being
> included in the set of constraints generated by 15.12.2.8 (but not by
> javac). It's important to fix it both because it's preventing other
> important inference fixes (6638712) and because it might lead to
> problems when implementing an item of the project coin (namely 'Concise
> initialization of generic variables' [2]).
>
> Let's try to keep things simple: let's start from the example recently
> submitted by Martin, which I think it's the simpler test case I've seen
> so far:
>
> class Test<X> {
>
>  <K extends Test<K>> void m() {}
>
>  void test() {
>   m();
>  }
> }
>
> When you compile this, the compiler complains with the following message
> (afaik this affects all compilers, jdk 5, 6, 6-open, 7):
>
> TestX.java:6: incompatible types; inferred type argument(s)
> java.lang.Object do not conform to bounds of type variable(s) K
> found   : <K>void
> required: void
>   m();
>    ^
> 1 error
>
> The message is somewhat messy, and hard to understand, but the meaning
> it's simple: the type inferred for K is Object; unfortunately Object is
> not compatible with K's declared bound; in fact Object should be a
> subtype of [K:=Object]Test<K> = Test<Object> which is obviously not true.
>
> How happened that jaac inferred Object for K? According to JLS
> 15.12.2.8, the following set of constraints should be derived for the
> above method call:
>
> Test<K> >> K
>
> K should then be inferred as glb(Test<K>) = Test<K>.
>
> This is unfortunate at best for two reasons: first, the inferred type
> for K is defined in terms of K itself; secondly, Test<K> does not
> conform to K's declared bound, as Test<K> <: [K:=Test<K>]Test<K> =
> Test<Test<K>> does not hold.
>
> However, javac impl does not seem to follow JLS here; in fact, javac is
> deliberately removing any recursive constraint from the set derived from
> 15.12.2.8. Since there's just one constraint here, this leave us with
> the answer K = Object, which is slightly better than the solution
> provided by the JLS as it does not contains further references to K -
> but still does not satisfy K's declared bound.
>
> [Sidebar: there other examples in which javac follows more closely the
> algorithm described by the JLS - in other words, sometimes javac fails
> to exclude recursive bounds from the set of generated constraints,
> because of minor trivial bugs - such bugs are however crucial when it
> comes to compile the code of some compiler regression tests!]
>
> Now the though question: how should JLS deal with this? I think there
> are at least two available options:
>
> 1) Give up inference (which means that javac is right) and inferring
> Object for K (which then causes a compilation error because Object does
> not conform to K's bound).
>
> 2) Adopt a complex inference scheme that would allow 15.12.2.8 to yield
> an inferred type that (i) does not depend on K and (ii) respect K's
> declared (recursive) bound.
>
> I went for (2), and here's why: in our running example (and in similar
> examples we have in our regression codebase), one could be tempted to
> say: ''this is just rubbish, fix your code, please''. On the other hand,
> last year I noticed that there are several use cases that would start to
> fail if we choosed (1):
>
> Object value = Enum.valueOf((Class)Test.class, "");
>
> where Enum.valueof is defined as follows
> <T extends Enum<T>> T valueOf(Class<T>, String)
>
> In this case we have that T cannot be inferred from actual arguments (as
> the only argument is raw here). It follows that T must be inferred in
> 15.12.2.8; here we have the following constraints:
>
> T <: Object (for the return type)
> T <: Enum<T> (declared bound)
>
> In other words we are in the same situation as above - only, this coding
> pattern is way more common (here inferring Object for T would cause the
> above code to be rejected). At this point you might have a question: how
> does javac deal with this code? We showed how javac is not capable of
> handling recursive bounds; the trick here is that javac (very
> surprisingly) never applies 15.12.2.8 (since this is an unchecked call).
> Which also means that javac never has to find an answer to the above
> question. Note that one day javac will be corrected so that 15.12.2.8
> will be applied even in this case - the fact that javac doesn't apply
> 15.12.2.8 can be regarded as a bug (one of the biggest consequences of
> this is CR 6638712).
>
> Back to the original question, given the only constraint (derived from
> 15.12.2.8):
>
> Test<K> >> K
>
> What type should we infer for K?
>
> I have shown that Object is not a viable answer (does not respect K's
> declared bound). At first it would seem that we should pick a type among
> the following candidates:
>
> -Test<?>
> -Test<? extends Test<?>>
>
> Those types are surely better than Object, but all have the problem of
> not satisfying K's bound: e.g.
>
> Test<?> <: [K:=Test<?>]Test<K> = Test<Test<?>> (false because
> type-argument Test<?> does not contain ?)
>
> I think there's only one solution to this problem, which is the following:
>
> K inferred as #1, where #1 is a captured type variable whose upper bound
> is Test<#1>. Let's see how this works w.r.t. to bound checking:
>
> #1 <; [K:=#1]Test<K> = Test<#1>
> ub(#1) = Test<#1> <: Test<#1> (true!)
>
> This solution has all the required properties, in that (i) the inferred
> type does not contain reference to the type to be inferred (T) and (ii)
> the inferred type satisfy K's declared bound.
>
> As you can see, the right answer is not that trivial - moreover as Alex
> mentioned in the related JLS CR [3], an acceptable solution should be
> able to deal with more complex cases like:
>
> class Foo {
>   <T extends List<U>, U extends List<T>> U foo() {return null;}
>   List<?> s =  foo();
> }
>
> Here we have two mutually referring recursive bounds (aaargh!). My
> solution works by inferring #1 (extends List<#2>) for T and #2 (extends
> List<#1>) for U.
>
> Final note:
> Since my approach makes use of some synthetically generated
> captured-type variables with recursive bounds, sometimes javac might
> crash because  of a problem in the toString routine for CapturedTypes
> (infinite loop). A recent, separate diagnostic work, ease this problem
> by truncating the infinite regression - what I'm saying is that, wthout
> proper diagnostic support, it won't be possible to support this fix as
> it is. The problem is that each captured type in the javac world is
> associated to an underlying wildcard type argument (the one that
> originated the captured type). In this case it's obvious that, given the
> fact that the captured type variable I'm introducing is synthetic,
> there's no such wildcard type argument - however I believe that
> displaying a meaningful wildcard to the user could help him understand
> what went wrong in case of errors - but one could always replace the
> synthetic captured type's wildcard argument with a simpler type, such as
> Test<?> (instead of the more precise Test<? extends #1> which leads to
> infinite recursion).
>
> Maurizio
>
> [1] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mcimadamore/6369605/<http://cr.openjdk.java.net/%7Emcimadamore/6369605/>
> [2] http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4879776
> [3] http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6369608
> [4] http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6369605
>
>
>
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