RFR : 7144488 StackOverflowError occurres on list via Collections.synchronizedList(List)

[Doug Lea]

On 02/22/12 21:44, David Holmes wrote:

> I'm not a fan of collections containing themselves, but I think it is simple to
> fix contains(o)/contains[Key]|[Value](o) and remove(o) in a similar way. Though
> none of the wrapped collections currently handle that case, so I'm okay with not
> addressing this part.
>

It was a deliberate decision not to include any evasive schemes
for collections that contain themselves, because the problem is
unsolvable in general. The patch addresses those that directly contain
themselves, but not the transitive closure, as in:
c1 contains c2 that in turn contains c1. Our take was that
it is a feature, not a bug, that anyone using equals or hashCode
in such cases hits infinite recursion.

People are free to change policies about this, but do bear in
mind that any changes along these lines are intrinsically
incomplete.

(Although for pre-collections (Java1.1) legacy
compatibility reasons, java.util.Hashtable.hashCode does
include an ugly stopgap to avoid infinite recursion
in the direct case.)

-Doug