Clarification on migration to value types and boxed vs unboxed representations

[Brian Goetz]

> I suspect that 3rd party library authors are in a more pickley situation
> having not planned this through as clearly. Upside: they are probably
> willing to do backwards incompatible releases where its a very
> corner-case situation. I'm trying to think if I believe this to be worse
> than variables called enum or implementations of List that had `List<T>
> sort(Comparator)`.

Age makes a difference too.  Optional is new, and the disclaimers 
arrived on day 1.  Integer, on the other hand, is probably hopelessly 
polluted, and I am sure that it would break gobs of important code if 
Integer ceased to be lockable (despite what we may think of such a 
practice.)

It may be that Optional remains forever polluted by identity, preventing 
us from migrating it to a value, which would be Really Sad, but not out 
of the realm of possible.  I'm still optimistic (mostly probably because 
I've not thought really hard about it yet.)