AnnotationType alternative patch

[Peter Levart]

Hello Joel and the list,

While revisiting the patch that I proposed a couple of months ago:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2012-December/012630.html

...and which also includes some other things besides the main fix for 
scalability and dead-locks, I tried to see what It would take to modify 
the annotation parsing logic in a way that would make construction of 
AnnotationType instance infinite-recursion-free without resorting to 
publishing the reference to the instance in the middle of the 
constructor. As it turns out the changes are quite simple:

http://freeweb.t-2.net/peter_levart/jdk8-tl/AnnotationType/webrev.01/index.html

I added an overloaded method to AnnotationParser which only parses 
select annotations (quickly skipping the rest of raw annotation bytes) 
and implicitly considers those annotations as having RUNTIME retention. 
This method is used inside the constructor of AnnotationType just for 
parsing the @Retention and @Inherited meta annotations for annotation class.

This way the infinite recursion is broken and there's no need to publish 
the half-constructed instance just to prevent it. Everything else is 
easy: the AnnotationType class is now immutable (all fields final) and 
can be published to other threads via data race (removed synchronized 
from AnnotationType.getInstance()). Scalability is infinite and 
dead-locks are eliminated.

This patch also fixes inconsistent behavior when we have two mutually 
recursive RUNTIME annotations and one's scope is changed to CLASS and 
separately compiled - the situation that I described in above-mentioned 
message.

Regards, Peter