valhalla-dev Digest, Vol 17, Issue 3

[Vitaly Davidovich]

On Saturday, December 19, 2015, Thomas W <twhitmore.nz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Vitaly.
>
> If Optional<T> is the goal, perhaps the question might be to inline/
> specialize the storage of monadic/ "wrapper types" generally?
>

I don't see why types/wrappers over one other type are special.  Optional
is special in that when it abstracts over a ref type the semantic of the
type can be fulfilled naturally by virtue of ref types already having an
absence value: null.  The main point is you can exploit type info when it's
provided.  That's kind of the point of specialization.


> There are probably a range of monadic/ wrapper types having one "major
> field" and decorated it with simple behavior. However relying on handcoding
> magic specializations in ArrayList, will restrict it to applying to
> Optional only.
>
> An alternative way of looking at this is to to designate Optional as
> "inline value" which then would enable a _generalized system_ to
> arbitrarily reorganize its storage and store/materialize it as necessary.
> While stored it would not be in standard representation and inlined
> accessors would be adapted to the inline storage representation.
>
> > The biggest advantage to doing this via specialization is that if you do
> come up with a better way to represent a generic type
> > with a given type arg, the user of such instantiations doesn't need to
> change their code.
>
> I was going to call you on this before -- claiming "flexibility" by having
> a very limited number of types specially coded for JDK Collections -- with
> the requirement for M * N custom code sections, M being the # of collection
> implementations and N being the number of types you specially support -- is
> not really very flexible.
>
> You're trading off the need for use-site awareness, for the need for
> collection-implementation awareness :)
>
>
How is this different from creating named types for all those
specializations? It's always preferable to put more burden on lib author
than its users, when given the choice.


> Regards,
> Thomas
>
>

-- 
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