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

[Paul Sandoz]

I’ll push it for you,
Paul.

> On May 1, 2020, at 2:13 PM, Jorn Vernee <jorn.vernee at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>