RFR 9: 8138696 : java.lang.ref.Cleaner - an easy to use alternative to finalization

[Roger Riggs]

Hi Mark,

Memory is an increasingly critical resource, we should be giving 
developers more tools
to manage their use of memory.  The Weak and Soft reference forms of the 
cleaner make
it easier to be aware of and respond to increased memory pressure.

The management of memory is not hypothetical for most large 
applications.  It was one topic
that came up in questions at J1.  Developers do quite a bit of work 
trying to figure out algorithms
for working caches, serializing to disk, and having the data available 
when it is needed.
There is a lot of guesswork about how GC is working and how it behaves 
at/near the limits.
SoftReferences are a bit of a blunt instrument but they provide evidence 
an application
can use to regulate its long term memory use.

The WeakReference forms, if provided, can be an alternative to the 
ideosyncratic
cleanup approaches used in various Weak keyed and weak values collections.
sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
If there are other mechanisms contemplated for more efficient memory 
management
then perhaps these are not necessary but if not the current mechanisms 
should be easier to use.

Roger





On 11/23/2015 5:32 PM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> ( Finally getting back to this, after too many weeks of travel ... )
>
> 2015/10/20 11:28 -0700, roger.riggs at oracle.com:
>> Sorry for the silence, JavaOne preparations and the availability of
>> folks who wanted to review have stretched things out.
>>
>> The Cleaner API was very simple and saw feature creep as the ideas for
>> how it might be used were explored.  There are concerns about
>> committing to supporting subclassable CleanableReferences in all
>> future JDK versions before there had been a chance to see how if they
>> would be useful and necessary to address the need to reduce the use of
>> finalization within the OpenJDK and beyond.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Updated Javadoc:
>>     http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~rriggs/cleaner-doc/
>>
>> Updated Webrev:
>>      http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~rriggs/webrev-cleaner-8138696/
> I'm very happy to see this API return to something like its original
> simple form, but I think it can be simplified even further.
>
> We have a very strong need for phantom-ref-based cleaners, so as to
> discourage people from relying upon flaky finalization. The arguments in
> support of the weak and soft forms have, by contrast, been rather weak
> (and soft?).  I don't think it's right to bake methods into a core API
> based on just a couple of hypothetical use cases.  I'd much rather see
> the Cleaner::{phantom,soft,weak}Cleanable methods reduced to a single
> register method,
>
>      Cleaner.Cleanable register(Object, Runnable);
>
> which would create the phantom form only.  If strong justification for
> the other forms arise then we can generalize this later, either to
> distinct register{Soft,Weak} methods or, perhaps, to a method that takes
> a type token.
>
> - Mark