RFR 8150778: Reduce Throwable.getStackTrace() calls to the JVM

[John Rose]

On Mar 4, 2016, at 2:00 PM, Mandy Chung <mandy.chung at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Footprint of MemberName as well as GC pressure (as they are kept as weak references in VM) are the performance concern that we will have to look at it in a future release.

I hope we can increase our investment on MemberName as an all-purpose handle from Java to JVM metadata (like java.lang.Class).

Specifically, the weak-pointer logic can probably be tuned to reduce overheads, at the cost of increased coupling between MemberName and the JVM.

But the coupling is reasonable; we need something like that, and jlr.Method is way too heavy.

— John