Serialization stability

[David M. Lloyd]

On 10/08/2012 10:45 AM, Brian Goetz wrote:
>> Well, they don't really solve the problem of making serialization
>> correct; they accept as given that it's OK for anonymous and (worse yet)
>> capturing lambdas to be serialized with the expectation that it'll just
>> be flat-out wrong if you change the source in any way, which is
>> something I absolutely do not concede and which I firmly believe will
>> bite us (where "us"=="Java EE vendors"... and RMI users, and JPA users,
>> and just about any of the hundreds of widely-used serialization-based
>> technologies out there).
>
> I think the correctness you seek is just inachievable.  Even with named
> classes, serialization has all sorts of limits and gotchas.

Sure, but by and large it works.  There are few surprises as long as you 
stick to named classes.

> With inner
> classes, people have learned that you can use inner classes with
> serialization when you have identical bytecode on both sides of the
> pipe, and can't otherwise.

That's not perfectly accurate; only anonymous (and, I think, local) 
classes have this limitation.  "Regular" inner classes generally work 
fine, even if the source is rearranged, since by and large (from my 
experience anyway) everyone uses the same representation for inner class 
names and outer class links.

> Its imperfect, but it seems a reasonable bar to say "no worse than inner classes".
> I get that you would like to set a higher bar -- and I'm open to seeing
> what we can do to meet a higher bar.  But first we should meet the bar
> we have, and we're stuck there.

I disagree - anonymous classes were an oversight; just because one thing 
doesn't work does not give justification to make more problems.  It's 
more of an excuse.  I think we *can* limit serialization to named 
references, and this would cause a better user experience; and, as far 
as I'm able to figure, this is actually a *lower* bar 
implementation-wise, therefore I think *this* should be our default 
setting rather than (what appears to be) going out of our way to repeat 
mistakes of the past for the sake of consistency.

-- 
- DML