Meeting today: IdentityClass

[Remi Forax]

If it's possible, i would like to discuss about IdentityClass again.

As noted in the last draft, adding IdentityClass automatically at runtime is not a compatible change if tests that uses Class::getInterfaces() are not written correctly,
and sadly, a lot of tests are written that way. I'm guilty to having written those tests too.
I don't believe that the solution is to tweak the reflection because adding IdentityClass at runtime is already a hack and introducing a hack² (hack square hack) is usually where we should stop before anyone sanity goes under the bus.

The purpose of IdentityClass is
- to have a classfile for the javadoc describing the behavior of all identity class
- to be used as type or bound of type parameter.

Apart the result of Class::getInterfaces() being hardcoded, IdentityClass has to other issues, as javadoc container, given that IdentityClass is inserted by the VM, it means there is no place in the Java code where someone can click to see the javadoc in an IDE, we have the same issue with java.lang.Record currently, the class is added by javac automatically and unlike java.lang.Enum, there is no method useful on java.lang.Record (equals/hashCode and toString are defined directly on the record) so very few of my student where able to understand why a record with a NaN value was equals to itself.
But there is a more serious issue, using IdentityClass is not backward compatible with Object.
When we have introduced IdentityClass, one scenario was to be able to declare that the type parameter corresponding to the keys (K) to only support identity class.
This is not possible using IdentityClass because the erasure of K will be IdentityClass instead of Object (IdentityClass also appears when the compiler will to a lub, so the common class of String and URI will be computed as IdentityClass instead of Object leading to source compatibility issues).

I think at that point, we should go back to our blackboard and see if there is no other solution.

I see two, one is to do *nothing* and do not add a type saying that only identity class is a corner case after all,
the other is to piggyback on erasure not unlike Scala does, i.e. IdentityClass is a fake class that is erased to Object at runtime.

regards,
Rémi