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

[Laurent Bourgès]

Hi,

I am the author of the Marlin renderer, integrated in both java.desktop &
javafx.graphics modules.

I wonder if such core annotations @Stable @ForceInline ... could be allowed
to such openjdk modules in order to improve performance.

Marlin already uses jdk.internal.Unsafe but @Stable looks promising as
Marlin uses (and recycles) lots of int/double arrays.

I already made my fields (& constants) final but it is not enough to let
hotspot trust totally my code, isn't it ?

I think these annotations are confined to java.lang for now.
I will check thatasap.

Cheers,
Laurent

Le 12 janv. 2018 9:50 AM, "Andrew Haley" <aph at redhat.com> a écrit :

> 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>
> EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671
>