'byfile' compilation policy

[Jonathan Gibbons]

On 04/28/2016 10:43 AM, Liam Miller-Cushon wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 1:55 AM, Maurizio Cimadamore 
> <maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com 
> <mailto:maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Liam,
>     the approach you put forward seems sensible; one alternate
>     approach would be to let the entire compilation unit through until
>     Gen if a dependency is encountered rather than stopping at desugar
>     - but I assume that's what you said it's problematic because of
>     cycles?
>
>
> Right, the repro in my original message is an example of that. The 
> compilation units are: [One, Two] and [Three, Four], and the 
> superclass dependencies are: One -> Three, Four -> Two. So we can 
> linearize the classes to group by compilation unit, or so the 
> superclasses are encountered first, but not both.
>
>     A meta-question: is it still worthwhile to have separate
>     compilation policies? I see that at least two of them (ATTR_ONLY
>     and CHECK_ONLY) can probably be replaced by other options (i.e.
>     -XDshouldStop) - are there significant use cases out there relying
>     on either byfile or simple? Given that, as it has been observed,
>     javac will need to bypass the compilation policy anyway to
>     guarantee the correctness of the generated code (i.e. that
>     supertypes are desugared before subtypes) - can a client really
>     blindly rely on the assumption that a compilation policy does what
>     it says on the tin?
>
>
> Consolidating the existing policies sounds like a good idea to me. I 
> haven't seen any uses of ATTR_ONLY or CHECK_ONLY. Using bytodo isn't 
> great for our purposes for the reasons Eddie described. In a previous 
> thread [1] it was mentioned that byfile was originally supposed to 
> become the default. Maybe it's time to consider replacing bytodo?
>
> [1] 
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/compiler-dev/2015-August/009748.html

bytodo was the original JDK5-era policy, and yes, byfile was a step 
towards trying to support an "all or nothing" policy for a compilation 
unit. If we can reasonably make that work, I think it would be good to 
make it the default and maybe eventually, the only variant.

-- Jon
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