RFR: 8215995: Add specialized toArray methods to immutable collections

[Claes Redestad]

On 2019-01-08 03:44, Stuart Marks wrote:
>> This is one of Stuart's designs
> 
> Trying to blame it all on me, aren't you? :-)

Yes: you are being too nice! :-)

> 
> Overall the changes look good.

Thanks!

> 
> I can't really speak to how to improve the loops in certain 
> circumstances (the "tricky circular array traversal code from 
> ArrayDeque" as Martin puts it). But I observe that moving the 
> randomization to iteration has started to increase the complexity of the 
> code. I understand why we did this, but it's starting to look like we 
> might want to refactor the various loops into a single internal 
> "iterator" to avoid duplicating it all over the place. Perhaps for a 
> future enhancement.

Right, one generic loop method which accepts one of a few statically
defined Functions might cut it, but it would need to be implemented with
care not to regress anything and might not significantly reduce
complexity until we add a few more specializations.

> 
> I observe that the serialized forms aren't randomized. When the storage 
> order was randomized, the serial form was also randomized. But now that 
> randomization is done during iteration, the serialized forms are fixed. 
> Hmmm. Not sure what I think about that.

Doesn't it mean we're now actually better at randomizing iteration order
on a run-to-run basis, whereas if we just picked up and went with a
serialized storage we'd retain the iteration order you'd get in the old
VM instance?

Thanks!

/Claes