JDK 9 RFR of 8032397: Remove sun.misc.Ref

[Alan Bateman]

On 21/01/2014 18:28, Joe Darcy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Following up from an earlier discussion on core-libs [1], I've gone 
> through the exercise of purging sun.misc.Ref from the JDK repo. Patch 
> below (having difficulties uploading the webrev to cr.openjdk at the 
> time of writing.)
>
> For the change associated with removing sun.misc.Ref, I was aiming to 
> minimize the alteration of surrounding code.
>
> For sun.misc.Cache, the CacheEntry class that subclasses Ref before 
> now instead has an internal SoftReference and a few short methods that 
> Ref used to define.
>
> In the Applet area, since the functionality of sun.misc.Ref over and 
> above SoftReference was being used, I copied and partially generified 
> the sun.misc.Ref code into AppletImageRef. Semantically, 
> AppletImageRef is now a sun.misc.Ref<Image>.
>
> The purge of Ref required removing a method from AppletResourceLoader, 
> a class which looks like it should have long ago been deprecated.
>
> A clean build of the jdk repo works after sun.misc.Ref has been 
> deleted. Before pushing the change, I'll do a jprt job to make sure 
> there aren't any other stray uses of Ref.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Joe
I think this is okay, just took me a few seconds to see what had moved 
from Ref (along with the javadoc comments). A minor comment is that 
Cache has an @see sun.misc.Ref in its class description that should be 
removed.

I searched the forest and I see there are two RMI tests that reference 
it, one directly, the other seems to be just a comment.

I also see that jhat looks for sun.misc.Ref in the heap. I guess someone 
could use a JDK 9 build and run jhat to look at a heap dump from a older 
JDK where sun.misc.Ref is used so maybe there is an argument to leaving 
this in. If you do then maybe it needs a comment.

-Alan.