New candidate JEP: 502: Stable Values (Preview)

[David Gregory]

> While we started working on this for MH/VH-related use cases (for 
> instance, FFM's jextract will be a big user of stable values), we also 
> realized that this abstraction is actually quite useful in other cases 
> too.

This is really exciting! Stable values open the door to some really exciting language features, especially in functional languages.

For example, something similar is used to implement the tail-recursion modulo cons transformation in the OCaml compiler: https://ocaml.org/manual/5.3/tail_mod_cons.html#sec:details

This could enable languages hosted on the JVM to make all kinds of not-quite-tail-recursive programs stack safe without using explicit stacks to store the intermediate values.

Is it possible that the informal rules for record components will be adjusted to allow stable fields in addition to final ones?

Thanks,
   David Gregory