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

[Jorn Vernee]

The CSR for this patch is now Approved, so it looks like this patch is 
ready to be sponsored.

Here are the relevant links again.

Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8241100
CSR: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8241667
Patch: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jvernee/8241100/webrev.04/

Thanks,
Jorn

On 18/03/2020 15:08, 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
>