RFR (S): CR 8004318/JEP 171 Fences intrinsics

[David Chase]

On 2012-12-05, at 8:56 AM, Aleksey Shipilev <aleksey.shipilev at oracle.com> wrote:

> Totally agree. Now to constructive side: are you up to actually clean up
> Unsafe? *This* makes a perfect JEP to have the open discussion about.

In theory, yes, in practice, I have to be sure that I won't be told this is not what I should be spending time on, and I am also sufficiently new to Openjdk that I am almost completely ignorant of process and even acronyms.  I'm still working towards getting committer rights.  But "Unsafe" as an implementation layer for safe languages, that I have decades of experience with.

>> If nothing else, profligate use of "Unsafe" increases the amount of
>> code that must be reviewed with a microscope, when only a magnifying
>> glass is necessary.
> 
> Totally agree x2. Again, do we want to push away fences from Unsafe to
> make the room for cleaning up Unsafe? If so, would be it better to move
> fences to, say, sun.misc.Fences? Seems to fit the bill for what you are
> suggesting of splitting up the Unsafe?

I'm on the (ahem) fence here.  I don't feel like ticking off Doug, deadlines are approaching, and I don't think this is the only wart in the Unsafe layer.  On the other hand, how hard could it be to stuff it all in some other class of sun.misc?  It doesn't actually need access protection, because (straining my pathological imagination here to think of an example, finding none) it's not a security hole.

David