"Model 2" prototype status

[Brian Goetz]

> This all sounds pretty encouraging so far to me. I feel like all my major tick boxes are being steadily, if tentatively, filled. Thanks for the update!

Thanks!  Some boxes ticked, many more boxes to go...

> I suppose this must mean there is a realistic possibility that will
> /not/ in fact be meaningful, which is a surprise to me... Is this
> something that has been discussed in more depth and I missed it? If
> anyone could expand on this a little (preferably to give a little
> reassurance that I'm overreacting to the importance, or that the chances
> are low for this to end up being the case!) I'd be pretty relieved. It
> feels like it'd be a pretty huge blow, and given my (limited)
> understanding I can't see what particularly troublesome issues this even
> presents.

Martijn is exactly right; we have to be very conservative about what we 
commit to, and want to wait to work through the issues.  Almost nothing 
is trivial; it is a frequent occurrence that something starts out 
looking like "couldn't possibly be troublesome" and then surprising 
trouble ensues.  Often, we end up with conflicts between multiple softer 
goals, so by framing them as soft goals rather than assuming they are a 
done deal, we are more likely to avoid "boxing" ourselves into a corner.

We're on board with the idea that having values implement interfaces 
seems desirable.  So don't worry about that.

But, what does the implementation look like, and how do we balance the 
various goals?  As one example of the kind of thing we've yet to fully 
evaluate...

One goal is that values should be dense and flat, meaning no extraneous 
storage overhead (like headers).  If a value has no header, as we'd like 
it, what happens here:

   value class Moo implements Comparable { }

   Moo m = ...
   Comparable c = m;

The most obvious answer is "boxing".  (And such boxes have a better 
chance of being eliminated via escape analysis than existing boxes, as 
they can be "heisenboxes" -- tagged as being identity-hostile and 
therefore freely unboxed/reboxed.)  Maybe this answer is OK, but maybe 
this is still too much of an attractive nuisance.

Anyway, this stuff is all swapped out right now, as we've been focusing 
quite heavily on the translation aspects of wildcards and specialized 
generic methods, so we'll return to this topic later.  Further updates 
to come....