What happened to the "mutable struct" debate?

[Brian Goetz]

> If Brian & co could somehow be swayed to add them, I suspect this would
> drag in the requirement that you should be able to pass them by reference.
> Without that, they're of marginal utility since you can't avoid copying
> costs.  Passing things by reference would be yet another entirely new
> concept to java, and given some of the sentiment I've read on this list
> thus far, this would comatose some people.

Very much so.  This is indeed Big Strike #1 against them; this is a new 
big complexity that Java (platform and developers) have not had to deal 
with.

Which leads directly to Big Strike #2: passing mutable structs by 
reference leads to interior pointers (pointers into the middle of 
objects), which is a huge additional burden for the GC.  (I'm told this 
is one of the major reasons why .NET GC is so much slower than the JVM, 
because they have to deal with this additional requirement.)