WeakReference with null referent

[Roger Riggs]

Hi,

After so many years of accepting null, throwing NPE would an 
incompatible change
and break existing uses.
Documenting it as ill advised or useless is would be a useful caution.

Regards, Roger


On 7/9/18 3:59 PM, Per Liden wrote:
>
> On 2018-07-09 20:49, mandy chung wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 7/9/18 11:31 AM, Zheka Kozlov wrote:
>>> It is possible to create a WeakReference/SoftReference/PhantomReference
>>> with a null value in which case the Reference will never be 
>>> enqueued. This
>>> is quite obvious (since null cannot be weakly/softly/phantom 
>>> reachable).
>>> But I think it's worth being mentioned in the JavaDoc. What do you 
>>> think?
>>>
>>
>> Alternatively, the constructor should require non-null referent and 
>> throws NPE if null.
>>
>> I created https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8206933 to track 
>> this.
>
> It's not completely obvious to me that throwing NPE or otherwise 
> blocking this is the right thing to do. Sure, creating a Reference 
> with a null referent seems pretty useless, but it's also very similar 
> to creating a Reference and immediately calling its clear() method, 
> which is perfectly valid (and equally useless).
>
> Are you saying we should block this because we can easily detect this 
> particular case/misuse, as opposed to the immediately-called-clear 
> case? Or is there some other rationale?
>
> cheers,
> Per