Valhalla EG notes November 21, 2018

Brian Goetz brian.goetz at oracle.com
Fri Nov 30 16:22:55 UTC 2018


> 2. Substitutability
> Remi: lambda examples use ==. None use == followed by .equals, in fact 
> none use .equals.
> Karen: other searches have found 10-50% use == followed by .equals
> Remi: Hard to find cases with static Object/Interface and dynamic 
> Lambda today

Code that knows what it is dealing with generally uses either `==` or 
`.equals()` but not both.

Generic code (including dynamically typed code, like pre-generic 
collections) generally use `==` followed by `.equals()`, but sometimes 
just uses `.equals()` (which is OK).  Just using `==` is, of course, 
dangerous, unless you know that you are dealing with constrained 
instances (enums, interned strings, etc.)

The historical route by which we got here is:
  - In the interpreted days, `==` was a fast filter for `.equals()`, 
since when crawling a list, most things are not equal to what you're 
looking for;
  - Because `==` was historically fast, it is harmless as a pre-check.

Now, method invocation got faster, and `==` is going to get slower, so 
obviously the equilibrium will change.

> Karen: Challenges:
>    component-wise substitutability
>       - primitives - usual check (floating point extra care)
>       - pojos - non-Object/Interface - reference comparison
>       - value type - static or dynamic (Object/Interface) - requires 
> recursive check
>
> Concerns:
>       performance - due to lots of fields or depth or both
>       could get StackOverflowError from unbounded links
>          e.g. for a valid use case - tree-node
>
> Is it appropriate for acmp to perform a substitutability check? It was 
> intended as a short circuit pretest to a longer test.

I am still preparing my armaments for this assault :)

> 3. Nullability
> Editor’s note: LW2: QPoint; null-free reference to Point. LPoint; 
> nullable box for Point.

I would prefer to reframe this as "opting into protection against 
uninitialized values".




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