RFR: 8362885: A more formal way to mark javac's Flags that belong to a specific Symbol type only [v2]

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:38:38 GMT, Jan Lahoda <jlahoda at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> This PR proposes to improve handling of javac's `Flags` in two ways:
>> - for each flag, there's now an informational annotation specifying what is the target Symbol type. Only targets right now are `TypeSymbol`s, `MethodSymbol`s and `VarSymbol`s. If we ran out of flags for `TypeSymbol`s, we could split those to module/package/class/type variable, but it does not seem to be quite necessary yet. There's an auxiliary special `BLOCK`, which is for `JCBlock`.
>> - the manually handled `Flags.Flag` enum is replaced with autogenerated `FlagsEnum`
>> 
>> This is inspired by:
>> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/26181#pullrequestreview-2997428662
>> 
>> There may be some better to handle `Flags` eventually, but this hopefully improves the current situation at least somewhat, by providing more formal way to say the flags' target, and restricting the need to read comments and search for free flags.
>> 
>> As a side-effect of this annotation, the `test/langtools/tools/javac/flags/FlagsTest.java` now also prints which flags are free, for each Symbol type.
>> 
>> (I will remove the `build` label for now, until discussion on javac level is done, and will re-add it if we decide the goal to autogenerate the FlagsEnum makes sense.)
>
> Jan Lahoda has updated the pull request incrementally with three additional commits since the last revision:
> 
>  - Fixing toString value for flags that have ACC_ overloaded flags.
>  - Review feedback: marking ACC flags with the @Use annotation, forces split of the TYPE target into CLASS/MODULE/PACKAGE/TYPE_VARIABLE.
>  - Reflecting review feedback:
>    - when conflict is detected, the generator fails
>    - adding runtime checks
>    - using constants for number of bits

src/jdk.compiler/share/classes/com/sun/tools/javac/comp/Lower.java line 2130:

> 2128: 
> 2129:     public void visitModuleDef(JCModuleDecl tree) {
> 2130:         FlagsEnum.assertNoUnexpectedFlags(tree.sym.flags_field,

Not super sure about rolling this into Lower... but a separate visitor will also look a bit "too much"...

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PR Review Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/26452#discussion_r2231135323