RFR: Instrumentation plugin concept

[Alexandre Iline]

On Tue, 23 Feb 2021 16:05:33 GMT, Alexandre Iline <shurailine at openjdk.org> wrote:

> There are comments inlined in code review.
> Also it would be good to have a working plugin (not just a unit test) that could be used for gathering certain info.

Thanks for the comments, @lkuskov .

Developing an actual plugin may be a lot of work, depending on the plugin. I am planning to embark on implementing "data coverage" concepts, after this is pushed in. Many things need to be resolved for that plugin, including, but not limited to:
 * support for all data types
 * mechanism to specify data domains
 * "template" format and creation
 * report generation

A functional plugin would take a lot to develop, it would be a project on its own, it will not be possible to do it all in one commit. It may even go into a different source repository. 

Further on, additional changes to JCov itself to use Instrumentation plugin, should also be done by additional commits, not by this one. What I am suggesting, therefore, is to limit this change in its current scope. All questions and comments needs to be resolved first, of course.

One thing I agree on is that more tests are needed. I would be happy to work on that.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jcov/pull/9