What's in a CONSTANT_Class?

[Remi Forax]

Hi Karen,
With my ASM Hat,
both CONSTANT_Class_info “;Q<name>” and CONSTANT_ValueType_info that references an UTF8 are Ok for me.

Weirdly, having a CONSTANT_Value_info that reference a CONSTANT_Class_info is little harder to implement because the implementation of ASM is sensitive to the number of levels of indirection (it's hardcoded to be 4, a constant method handle has 4 levels).

On the longer term, I think that the spec of CONSTANT_Class should changed to accept a class descriptor and not a class name (which is not BTW because array are accepted in order to encode a method call to an array clone()).
It will allow more sharing and unlike a class name, a class descriptor is an extensible format.

>From the VM point of view, it's easy to know if a CONSTANT_Class is a descriptor or not, if it's a descriptor, the last character is a ';'.
I also think that the bytecode version corresponding to 10 should requires that all CONSTANT_Class are encoded as class descriptor.  

regards,
Rémi

----- Mail original -----
> De: "Karen Kinnear" <karen.kinnear at oracle.com>
> À: "Dan Smith" <daniel.smith at oracle.com>
> Cc: valhalla-spec-experts at openjdk.java.net
> Envoyé: Mercredi 14 Juin 2017 17:54:07
> Objet: Re: What's in a CONSTANT_Class?

> Update from hotspot implementation:
> 
> We would like to request that for the MVT Early Access we keep the TEMPORARY
> CONSTANT_Class_info “;Q<name>”.
> 
> This is far easier for us to implement (we have a prototype in progress) and we
> believe that it will be easier
> for bytecode generators to adopt - which will allow us to get more people trying
> MVT so we get more feedback.
> 
> We would also like to keep the explicit separate name for the derived value
> class, so that from an implementation
> standpoint we are able to continue to use the name, class loader pair as a
> unique lookup.
> So the JVMS as proposed explicitly calls out 5.3 Creation and Loading that the
> derived value class has the name ClassName$Value.
> 
> For Early Access we would like to keep this naming convention, stable across
> reboots, so people can generate byte codes
> that reference value types by name distinctly from their value capable class.
> 
> thanks,
> Karen
> 
> p.s. this will allow us time to do the longer-term exploration of where the
> class/type/constant pool forms should evolve