Sponsor Request: 8241100: Make Boolean, Character, Byte, and Short implement Constable

[Jorn Vernee]

Hi David,

Thanks for the heads up! A CSR for this patch was created here: 
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8241667

It was moved to 'provisional' today, but still requires one or more 
engineer reviews.

Could someone here review the CSR?

Thanks,
Jorn

On 18/03/2020 22:59, David Holmes wrote:
> Hi Jorn,
>
> This needs a CSR request before it can be pushed.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
> On 19/03/2020 12:08 am, Jorn Vernee wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Can someone please sponsor this patch that makes Boolean, Character, 
>> Byte, and Short implement Constable?
>>
>> Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8241100
>> Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jvernee/8241100/webrev.00/
>>
>> Having the other box types implement Constable makes them easier to 
>> use with APIs that accept any Constable. Though I'm mostly 
>> interesting in boolean, for which I'm currently falling back to 
>> "true" & "false" strings, but the downside is that this also requires 
>> parsing the string again and having to deal with random other strings.
>>
>> This patch also adds the ConstantBootstraps::convert method that is 
>> used to facilitate the conversion from int to (short|char|byte). This 
>> currently takes a source type explicitly. In practice, it seems that 
>> Object can always be used as a source type for the same behavior, but 
>> explicitly specifying source and destination types seems more robust 
>> to me in case this behavior ever changes, or we want to expand on the 
>> supported kinds of conversion. (for instance it is currently not 
>> possible to convert from an int to a Long directly, or from Short to 
>> Integer, but maybe those cases could be supported in the future as 
>> well).
>>
>> Testing: tier1-3 & downstream testing for my particular use case
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jorn
>>