RFC (round 1), JEP draft: Low-level Object layout introspection methods

[Peter Levart]

Hi,


Just a thought...


On 8/11/20 12:22 PM, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
> ...but dislike:
>      public static long addressOf(Object obj);
>      public static long fieldOffsetOf(Field field);


What exactly is the purpose of "addressOf" method in terms of 
information API? Is it used to estimate relative placement of several 
objects in the heap to see how they are scattered around which affects 
the CPU cache performance when accessing them?

If this is the case, then maybe the method could return a "mangled" 
address: the address + some secret random value calculated once for the 
whole VM. You could still picture the relative placement of objects with 
such value, but could not use it to actually access the data in the 
object (although as Roman Kennke already put it, the object address is a 
"moving target" today already and so can not be reliably used to access 
object data via the returned "long" address anyway).


Regards, Peter