API review of VarHandles

[Paul Sandoz]

Hi

This is a request to review the VarHandles API. The code reviews and pushes will occur separately, and flow through the hs-comp repo, most likely from the bottom up first with Unsafe changes.

The specdiff can be found here:

  http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/jdk9/varhandles/specdiff/overview-summary.html

(Note that specdiff renders some aspects of JavaDoc incorrectly, so just ignore any such quirks.)

A consensus on the set of access mode methods proposed by Doug was previously discussed and reached.

For the moment please ignore the following methods on MethodHandles: byteArrayViewVarHandle; and byteBufferViewVarHandle. It is necessary to revisit that functionality w.r.t. alignment and proposed enhancements to ByteBuffer (in discussion on valhalla-dev).

Paul.