FTR: JVM Lang Summit presentation

[Brian Goetz]

> slide 71:
>  I still think VarHandle is not a good idea. Having two way to represent roughly same thing, MethodHandle and VarHandle, is not a good idea.

In a perfect world, yes.  MethodHandle tried to model fields, it was a good first attempt, but it didn’t cover all the cases.  It can’t model accesses with (or without) fences; it can’t model atomic updates.  We could of course try to add more MH types to cover this, but the combinatorial explosion is large.  So, having explored the “continue down the MH path”, we discovered that the VarHandle path is richer and more suited to the problem.  Live and learn.