Can @Stable (or something similar) be made accessible?

[Andrew Haley]

On 12/01/18 04:33, Jason Greene wrote:

> The internal @Stable facility provides the desired semantics and
> precision, but it is heavily locked down, with privileged code
> checks and export restrictions. Could this be made more accessible
> (or perhaps a variant restricted to just final fields)? Informing
> the compiler that a final field is a true lazy initialized constant,
> with no store-to-final seems a pretty useful construct in general. I
> can understand that the long term desire is that this shouldn’t be
> necessary, and should be inferred [3], but at that point the
> annotation is still useful as documentation and legacy
> compatibility. If nothing else could it be allowed in non-privileged
> code via some flag?

I don't know of any way to do that without compromising the integrity
of the JVM.  All that anybody would have to do to break the VM is to
define a field as @Stable and then change the field.  I suppose you
could say that Unsafe is just as bad and people still are allowed to
use it, but there's understandable reluctance any further to transform
a safe runtime into an unsafe one.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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