Expose elementType of EnumSet and EnumMap

[Marcin Wiśnicki]

First of all EnumSet/EnumMap are not general purpose collections, they
are already implementation specific.

Also, since you can't subclass enum, class of contained values will be
the same as declaring class.
>From EnumSet documentation: "All of the elements in an enum set must
come from a single enum type".

I don't see how exposing getElementType() can hinder reification. I'm
going to say that it doesn't. Please provide counterexample if you
think I'm mistaken.

Here are your use cases:
1. Remove ugly hacks from serialization libraries that were known to
cause problems with different JVM implementations in the past (for
example see this code from jackson: http://goo.gl/yudBps)
2. A Visual editor of some sort may display EnumSet as a list of
checkboxes if it knows what type of enum values can be contained
within this set.

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Remi Forax <forax at univ-mlv.fr> wrote:
> On 09/21/2013 05:27 PM, Marcin Wiśnicki wrote:
>>
>> Third party serialization libraries and other tools need to know the
>> type of EnumSet elementType. Currently this field is package-private
>> and said libraries have to resort to non-portable reflection hacks.
>>
>> Please add EnumSet#getElementType() and EnumMap#getKeyType() methods.
>>
>> I've submitted this request to bugs.sun.com last month, where it
>> received Bug Id: 9006352. There was no further communication and that
>> bug is still not visible which doesn't surprise me as I've never had
>> any luck with bugs.sun.com even when submitting actual bug :(
>>
>> PS. Please keep me CC'ed.
>
>
> Hi Marcin,
> I've read the bug file but failed to find a description of a compelling use
> case for these methods.
>
> Adding these two methods goes against an important rule:
> try to avoid for sub-types of Collection, methods that are implementation
> specific, the history has proven multiple times that implementations of
> collections change a lot. This is a general rule, that we may want to ignore
> but it has to worth it.
>
> Also, I think it worth to understand what's elementType represent.
> elementType is not the class of the values contained in the set but the
> declaring class (Enum.getDeclaringClass) of the enum values. So despite
> being a Class, elementType is a type information that only exists has a
> field because generics are not reified. This has two consequences, the first
> one is that if you want to create an EnumSet, you need a way to have an
> elementType and the second one is that it may make the work of the people
> that want to reify generics in a future version of Java harder.
>
> and don't think I'm the dragon that keep the treasure, this is just my
> humble opinion and I try to do my best to explain why adding these methods
> is not obvious.
>
> regards,
> Rémi
>
>