A disclaimer or two for Optional

[Remi Forax]

I agree.

Rémi

On 10/19/2013 08:16 PM, Doug Lea wrote:
>
> This arose while contemplating some JDK9 possibilities...
>
> Note that Optional is itself a value-like class, without
> a public constructor, just factory methods.
> The factory methods do not even guarantee to return unique
> objects. For all that the spec does and should say,
> every call to Optional.of could return the same Optional
> object. (This would require a magical implementation,
> but still not disallowed, and variants that sometimes
> return the same one are very much possible.)
>
> This means that there are no object-identity-related
> guarantees for Optionals. "myOptional1 == myOptional2"
> tells you nothing, and synchronized(myOptional) has
> unpredictable effects -- it might block forever.
>
> People might find this surprising, so we probably want to
> add a sentence or two to the javadoc. How about the following.
> (We could symmetrically say that the instance returned by
> Optional.empty() need not be the  same each time, but that
> might be overkill?)
>
>     /**
>      * Returns an {@code Optional} with the specified present non-null 
> value.
> adding...
> * The returned instance need not be unique. Thus the results of
> * comparing two instances using @code{==}, or using one as the
> * argument for a @code{synchronized} block are arbitrary and should
> * be avoided.
>      *
>      * @param <T> the class of the value
>      * @param value the value to be present, which must be non-null
>      * @return an {@code Optional} with the value present
>      * @throws NullPointerException if value is null
>      */
>     public static <T> Optional<T> of(T value) {
>         return new Optional<>(value);
>     }
>