RFR: 8333566: Remove unused methods

[Erik Österlund]

On Tue, 4 Jun 2024 20:51:52 GMT, Cesar Soares Lucas <cslucas at openjdk.org> wrote:

> Please, consider this patch to remove unused methods from the code base. To the best of my knowledge, these methods are only defined but never used.
> 
> Here is a list with names of delete methods: https://gist.github.com/JohnTortugo/fccc29781a1b584c03162aa4e160e874
> 
> Tested with Linux x86_64 tier1-4, GHA, and only cross building to other platforms.

Some parts of the code, such as the assemblers, can be seen as tools that we have in our shed so that we can write other powerful code. If you have a shed full of tools, then naturally you can go through the shed and get rid of the tools we don't seem to currently use. Who needs a spade anyway? Nobody has used that spade for a year!

Except that eventually, the day always comes when you need a spade. Since you have now thrown away the only spade in the shed, you will find yourself with the option to either 1) try to make do with a trowel, which is horrible but might work as a hack. Or 2) you have to make a new spade yet again. And no, we can't buy a ready made spade.

It can be very annoying when you have what would seemingly be a trivial patch, but then you find out you won the lottery and you are apparently the first person in a while that needed a testl with a memory operand comparing against a 32 bit immediate, and have to go and read ISA manuals to figure out how to encode this thing correctly. It adds a large amount of extra work to add support for something that we should be able to take for granted.

I'm not a big fan of throwing away all the tools we have in the shed just because they haven't been used in a while. I don't want to dig my next hole with a trowel, nor do I want to build a new spade that we already have.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/19550#issuecomment-2154709857