RFR: jsr166 jdk integration 2018-02

[Martin Buchholz]

Hans, thanks for another great lesson!

On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 11:19 AM, Hans Boehm <hboehm at google.com> wrote:

>
> The downside of treating "this" specially is that it makes it even harder
> to explain the other cases, e.g. when the object being finalized
> prematurely was an explicit parameter, or perhaps even the result of a
> factory method.
>

Java programmer intuition says the "this" object receiver is special.  E.g.
there's no way to explicitly null out "this" in a method body to be nice to
the GC, as you can with a method argument.   Think how crazy "this = null;"
looks! But that's what the VM is doing on your behalf.

Anyways, back in the real world this change got submitted with
reachabilityFence.