Valhalla basic concepts / terminology

[Brian Goetz]

On 6/9/2020 7:00 PM, Kevin Bourrillion wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 2:18 PM Dan Smith <daniel.smith at oracle.com 
> <mailto:daniel.smith at oracle.com>> wrote:
>
>     A few things that still make me a bit uneasy, maybe could use more
>     noodling:
>
>     - "Inline value" vs. "reference value" makes sense. Then re-using
>     "inline" for "inline class" vs. "identity class" is potentially
>     confusing. In this context, we're using "inline" as shorthand for
>     "inline-capable" and "identity-free". It would sort of be nice if
>     we could flip the world and make 'identity' the class declaration
>     keyword (although we'd still need a term for the absence of that
>     keyword).
>
>
> My current way of spinning this to myself is that a class being 
> "inline" means it /enables/ possible inlining, /and/ that referring to 
> it as an "inline" type (its concrete type) is another step that also 
> /enables/ possible inlining, and in the end the VM will do what it 
> wants, subject to those limitations. So, I can see the term working at 
> both levels...

Perhaps the problem is that we've put the term on the secondary 
attribute rather than the primary.  The primary attribute is id-freedom, 
from which we derive the option to inline.  But we're calling them 
"inline".

>
>
>     - The syntax ".val" used to denote an "inline type" is a bit of a
>     mismatch. Maybe we want a new syntax. Or maybe we want to rework
>     the word "value" into the story so that "inline type" becomes
>     "value type".
>
>
> This was my reaction too. ".val" means "the value itself, that you 
> care about", and ".ref" means "a reference value that points to the 
> value you care about", but I used the word "value" /more/ times in the 
> second phrase. It doesn't feel like this will be clear.

My intention here was to appeal to terms many users already understand: 
pass by value and pass by reference.  That's why `V.val` is not `V.inline`.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/valhalla-spec-experts/attachments/20200609/acf9713f/attachment.htm>