RFR: 8349503: Consolidate multi-byte access into ByteArray

[Roger Riggs]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2025 23:41:19 GMT, Chen Liang <liach at openjdk.org> wrote:

> `MethodHandles.byteArrayViewVarHandle` exposes checked multi-byte access to byte arrays via VarHandle. This larger access speeds up many operations, yet it cannot be used in early bootstrap, and as a result, people tend to use `Unsafe` which can threaten memory safety of the Java Platform.
> 
> To promote the safe use of multi-byte access, I propose to move the checked implementations from VarHandle to ByteArray to allow earlier use and reduce maintenance costs. In addition, ByteArrayLittleEndian is consolidated, and now the access methods are distinguished by BO (byte order) / BE (big endian) / LE (little endian) suffixes to indicate their access features.

It would have been useful to get agreement on the concept and the naming before committing to the implementation.

The BE/BO/LE are noise in the API.  The little endian cases are a minority and should attract more attention in the API.
The network byte-order/big-endian cases should keep the simple names.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/23478#issuecomment-2640004192