Idea how to implement VT/VO compatibility in JVM

[Stéphane Épardaud]

On 01/22/2015 02:42 PM, Maurizio Cimadamore wrote:
> That's mostly where I was trying to get at - bridges are a part of 
> your approach - but it seems like some other part is missing in order 
> to make the approach consistent.

Well, sure, it requires _some_ support for `instanceof` and the 
reflection API to handle this. But the reflection API will already have 
to be tweaked for value types, so it's not like it's out of the question.

>> BTW, aren't you afraid of the proliferation of specialised classes at 
>> runtime for the VM? I know PermGen moved away, but still, classes are 
>> expensive to load…
> As you might know, I did some work on reification in my early days [1] 
> - among the things I found when implementing a JVM with support for 
> reification was that in real-world cases, the number of different 
> instantiation of the same generic class tends to be quite low. Of 
> course this is another area where we need more evidence.

I didn't know, but I would lean towards agreeing with you. At least in 
the end usage where you will only have N sorts of `ArrayList<T>`, but 
that multiplies because each is also a `List<T>` and an `Iterable<T>` 
and a `Collection<T>` and will access `Stream<T>`… so even though you 
will only instantiate N `T` values, you will get more classes than just N.