JEP 193: Enhanced Volatiles

[Doug Lea]

On 03/04/2014 02:41 AM, Jeroen Frijters wrote:
> Brian Goetz wrote:
>> Embedded in this proposal is the desire to not provide a full-blown
>> "lvalue" form for variables; supporting any form of pass-by-reference at
>> the language level is a super-non-goal here.
>
> Why is this? It solves these problems in an extremely clean way and also
> provides lots of other value (for example, for JEP 191: Foreign Function
> Interface).
>
> I understand pass-by-reference is an expensive feature, but IMNSHO poluting
> Java with this proposal will prove to be more expensive in the long run. It's
> like erased generics all over again.
>

The expensive version of pass-by-reference is already supported
using java.lang.reflect.Field. You can think of .volatile as
a version of such mechanics that only works within the
context of a single expression, not across method calls.
There is plenty of precedent for this. For example you
cannot emulate the  "+=" operator as a standalone method without
resorting to reflection. You can view this JEP as an extension
mechanism for safely adding similar l-value-based operators. (Although
only the JDK can implement these extensions.)

-Doug