Reference.reachabilityFence

[Vitaly Davidovich]

If we're going to bikeshed placement of the method, I'd like to propose a
different name for the method.  The "fence" part of the name doesn't make
much sense and is a common term used in memory ordering discussions.

How about keepAlive? Reference.keepAlive(Object) reads better, IMO.

sent from my phone
On Nov 24, 2015 8:00 AM, "Vitaly Davidovich" <vitalyd at gmail.com> wrote:

> One can look at reachabilityFence in same light as requesting gc or
> finalization, both of which live in Runtime.
>
> sent from my phone
> On Nov 24, 2015 7:54 AM, "David Holmes" <david.holmes at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> On 24/11/2015 7:32 PM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 24 Nov 2015, at 01:31, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 2015/11/23 8:38 -0800, paul.sandoz at oracle.com:
>>>>
>>>>> Please review the addition of Reference.reachabilityFence contributed
>>>>> by Aleksey, Doug and myself:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/jdk9/JDK-8133348-reachability-fence-jdk/webrev/
>>>>>
>>>>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/jdk9/JDK-8133348-reachability-fence-hotspot/webrev/
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> This seems eminently reasonable, but why does it belong in the
>>>> java.lang.ref.Reference class?  It has nothing (directly) to do
>>>> with reference objects.
>>>>
>>>> java.lang.Runtime, perhaps?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Out of all the places i thought Reference was the least indirect. The
>>> method documentation refers to the notion of "strongly reachable” in the
>>> j.l.ref package doc (I should update to link directly to that). In effect
>>> it’s an operation on potential referents that relates to reachability,
>>> garbage collection and finalization.
>>>
>>> A further weaker argument is Reference is not commonly used thus there
>>> may be less chance of this method being misused.
>>>
>>> I do prefer the current location, but i don’t strongly object to moving
>>> it to Runtime.
>>>
>>
>> As all Runtime methods are instance methods the usage here would be a bit
>> awkward. Personally I thought reference was a very suitable location for a
>> reachability-related method.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> David
>>
>> Paul.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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