RFR: 8285364: Remove REF_ enum for java.lang.ref.Reference [v4]

[Albert Mingkun Yang]

On Mon, 27 Jun 2022 14:27:37 GMT, Stefan Karlsson <stefank at openjdk.org> wrote:

>>> The _reference_type used to be initialized correctly in most cases, but
>> needed fixing up for a few cases during bootstrapping. With this change it is
>> never initialized correctly for Reference subtypes and always needs an
>> initialization kludge for them. That's not an improvement.
>> 
>> I don't agree that this is a kludge. This is quite common in HotSpot, and the code is quite understandable. It's far better than the initialization kludge the code had before this patch.
>> 
>> I'd like to suggest that we go with the proposed patch, and consider the Kim's latest proposal as a follow-up RFE. That way we can make progress on this RFE, and then weigh the pros and cons of this suggestion separately.
>
> Talked to Albert. He's already created a patch for this, so I retract my objection to this blocking of the PR.

Revised as Kim suggested.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/8332