JEP 254, HotSpot, and optimizations

[Andrew Haley]

On 23/03/16 07:32, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
> We thought that originally too, and some methods were written with
> Unsafe. But the sad realization that will come later is that using
> anything except plain Java (+ intrinsics) in String code would lead to
> surprising bootstrapping issues.
> 
> E.g. Unsafe is not really available when String, or any other primordial
> class, bootstraps -- Unsafe uses Strings too, and moving Unsafe init
> early before String init does introduce circularities. Not saying this
> is unresolvable with careful reshuffling the VM bootstrap sequence and
> peeling Unsafe, but intrinsics are safer this way.

Aha!  That makes sense.

Thanks,

Andrew.