RFR: 8153334: Replace BufferedInputStreams use of AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater with Unsafe

[Paul Sandoz]

> On 6 Apr 2016, at 16:45, Claes Redestad <claes.redestad at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> On 04/06/2016 04:09 PM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>>> small streams become big rivers (i don't know the idiomatic sentence in English, so it's a rough translation from a French idiom),
>>> "Death by a thousand cuts" is one of my favorites:).  A "flat profile" is another description of a similar thing.
>>> 
>> I still remain unconvinced in this case that such changes warrant an increase in unsafe usage (temporary or otherwise).
>> 
> 
> I did not intend for this patch to spark any controversy - in my mind it was just a rather straightforward and easy way to save a few Kbs (and some theoretic startup time) on small program startup and I'm happy to withdraw it based on the feedback.
> 

I don’t think there is any controversy. I just think we should place this one aside for the moment. We can revisit later on.

Paul.

> I do however think that reducing the dependency graph of things which are loaded in this early has merits on its own, regardless of how much it actually improves things. Using VHs here - or even in CHM - seems more controversial to me than using Unsafe to take shortcuts in low-level class libraries that need to boot fast and with as few dependencies as possible (since that allows them to be used in more places).
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> /Claes