[jmm-dev] Jmm revision status

[Doug Lea]

Things were moving along rather nicely. And then ... nothing.

My sense is that people following things closely suddenly became less
optimistic that we will arrive at something simple and beautiful and
readily understandable after seeing Peter Sewell's proposed amendments
to C++/C11 (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/cpp/notes44.html) and Alan
Jeffrey's unsimple follow-ups to his simple fresh start. See March
list archives at
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jmm-dev/2014-March/thread.html

This seems to happen all the time with memory models. Practical
necessities surrounding processors and optimizers lead to messiness.
In particular, most people wanted to get rid of JSR133 user-hostile
"justification sequences" and the like, but this is now far from a
sure thing. (Peter's approach amounts to a special form of them.)

All ideas would be welcome on how we can recover forward progress on
the core model. Especially since we do have some other updates
more-or-less conceptually ready to adapt to them, including actual
specs for "enhanced-volatile" acquire/release and other intrinsics,
and replacing the "final fields" specs with simpler constructor
release guarantees.

-Doug