API review of VarHandles

[Michael Haupt]

Hi Martin,

how about seeing j.l.i as a framework for lightweight reflection on the one hand, and for method handle-based meta-programming on the other? That's clearly usable beyond the domain of dynamic language implementation. Granted, the latter remains an important application area, but there are others. For example, JEP 280 uses invokedynamic for string concatenation.

In that vein, how about seeing VarHandles as a safer replacement for some of the Unsafe API? It's going to be public API, readily usable without having to enable access to the carefully tucked-away Unsafe.

Best,

Michael

> Am 26.01.2016 um 21:31 schrieb Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>:
> 
> There's a big "expectations" effect here.  j.l.invoke is "supposed to
> be" for making dynamic languages less slow, not for making low-level,
> ultra-non-dynamic operations faster.  Asking the Unsafe users of the
> world to switch to dynamic VarHandle is like asking C programmers to
> rewrite their code in perl 6 ... for performance!  It's the same
> "srsly?" feeling one gets reading """We can currently use RPerl to
> speed up low-magic Perl 5 code with over 300x performance gain."""

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