JEP proposed to target JDK 11: 318: Epsilon: An Arbitrarily Low-Overhead Garbage Collector

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On 01/18/2018 11:10 AM, Erik Österlund wrote:
> I do not feel too comfortable with this being a product flag regardless of the name. There is
> existing code that assumes that for example System.gc() will actually do something. Similar for
> assumptions that language features like finalizers and reference objects and queues will do anything
> at all. That makes me feel uncomfortable. Do you feel comfortable with exposing a product flag that
> breaks code relying on those features?

I do feel comfortable about this, because JLS and JVMS specify that GC is best-effort, and therefore
any other language and library feature that depends on GC is also best-effort. This allows, among
other things: no-op GCs, reclaiming GCs that never actually do touch references or finalizers, GCs
that fully ignore System.gc (remember -XX:-DisableExplicitGC that *is* a product option?), etc.

I think users at large understand the choice of GC implementation matters in how responsive (if
ever) the language/library features are.

Thanks,
-Aleksey