RFR: 8071507: (ref) Clear phantom reference as soft and weak references do

[Peter Levart]

On 12/05/2015 05:28 PM, Mandy Chung wrote:
>> On Dec 5, 2015, at 3:12 AM, Peter Levart <peter.levart at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 12/04/2015 10:58 PM, Mandy Chung wrote:
>>> "It is possible to create a phantom reference with a null queue, but such a reference is completely useless: Its get method will always return null and, since it does not have a queue, it will never be enqueued.”
>>>
>>> The puzzling part to me is why PhantomReference accepts null ReferenceQueue.   I can’t evaluate how high of the source incompatibility risk if we fixed it but I may propose that in a future release until I have cycle.
>>>
>>> Mandy
>>>
>> Well, it is not completely useless for PhantomReference to accept null ReferenceQueue. It's sometimes useful to have a common subtype of PhantomReference where most of instances perform a function of PhantomReference, but some instances are just there to provide the "glue" in the data structure. See the implementation of java.lang.ref.Cleaner and it's "root" nodes of a doubly-linked list ;-)
> That’s right.
>
> There may likely be some reason why it takes the null ReferenceQueue as noted in this comment in sun.misc.Cleaner:
>      // Dummy reference queue, needed because the PhantomReference constructor
>      // insists that we pass a queue.
>
> Mandy

Digging up the src.jar of JDK 1.2.2, here's what the constructor of 
PhantomReference looked like:

     /**
      * Creates a new phantom reference that refers to the given object and
      * is registered with the given queue.
      *
      * @throws  NullPointerException  If the <code>queue</code> argument
      *                                is <code>null</code>
      */
     public PhantomReference(Object referent, ReferenceQueue q) {
         super(referent, q);
     }


...so it seems Mark wanted PhantomReference constructor to throw NPE. 
But implementation did not do that (here's also the constructor of 
Reference):


     Reference(Object referent, ReferenceQueue queue) {
         this.referent = referent;
         if (referent == null) {
             /* Immediately make this instance inactive */
             this.queue = ReferenceQueue.NULL;
             this.next = this;
         } else {
             this.queue = (queue == null) ? ReferenceQueue.NULL : queue;
             this.next = null;
         }
     }


...and so the spec. has probably been modified to follow the standing 
behavior.



Regards, Peter