Reference.reachabilityFence

[David Holmes]

On 24/11/2015 7:32 PM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>
>> On 24 Nov 2015, at 01:31, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
>>
>> 2015/11/23 8:38 -0800, paul.sandoz at oracle.com:
>>> Please review the addition of Reference.reachabilityFence contributed
>>> by Aleksey, Doug and myself:
>>>
>>>   http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/jdk9/JDK-8133348-reachability-fence-jdk/webrev/
>>>   http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/jdk9/JDK-8133348-reachability-fence-hotspot/webrev/
>>
>> This seems eminently reasonable, but why does it belong in the
>> java.lang.ref.Reference class?  It has nothing (directly) to do
>> with reference objects.
>>
>> java.lang.Runtime, perhaps?
>>
>
> Out of all the places i thought Reference was the least indirect. The method documentation refers to the notion of "strongly reachable” in the j.l.ref package doc (I should update to link directly to that). In effect it’s an operation on potential referents that relates to reachability, garbage collection and finalization.
>
> A further weaker argument is Reference is not commonly used thus there may be less chance of this method being misused.
>
> I do prefer the current location, but i don’t strongly object to moving it to Runtime.

As all Runtime methods are instance methods the usage here would be a 
bit awkward. Personally I thought reference was a very suitable location 
for a reachability-related method.

Cheers,
David

> Paul.
>
>
>