RFR: 8349503: Consolidate multi-byte access into ByteArray

[Chen Liang]

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.

I think I should withdraw this patch: the multi-byte access is used for 2 purposes: to read actual larger data or just to read multiple bytes for performance, and ByteArray is for the former. We should probably look at vectors for the multiple byte access purpose.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/23478#issuecomment-2689141951