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

[Kim Barrett]

On Dec 4, 2015, at 1:07 PM, Kim Barrett <kim.barrett at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> On Dec 3, 2015, at 6:04 PM, Mandy Chung <mandy.chung at oracle.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> [Indeed, this whole section isn't strictly necessary; all of it can be
>>> inferred from information in other places.]
>> 
>> Agree.  This section is no longer necessary and maybe just remove it:
> 
> I wasn't actually intending to suggest removal.  It seems like there
> is useful overview information to be had here, rather than requiring
> readers to make not necessarily obvious inferences.  My impression is
> that readability is valued more highly than terseness in Java
> documentation.

Sorry for the long gap in the discussion.  Mandy and I have been
talking about what to do about the "Automatically-cleared references"
section that was the topic of some debate.  We've decided to eliminate
it, which led us to some additional modifications.

Here's the latest set of webrevs:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~kbarrett/8071507/jdk.06/
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~kbarrett/8071507/hotspot.06/

They've been rebased to hs-rt tip, which required resolving a minor
merge conflict with a nearby change to logging in
referenceProcessor.cpp.  Other than that, there are only specification
wording changes.  Here's the incremental change from the previous
version:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~kbarrett/8071507/jdk.06.inc/

We are treating the discussions around changing PhantomReference to
forbid a null queue as out of scope for this change.  As Mandy said
earlier, she might propose a separate change for that in the future.