Compatible Field Resolution

[Sebastian Sickelmann]

adding valhalla-dev.

Thanks to Brian pointing me in that direction.

On 11/29/2015 05:08 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:
> I think there may be some synergy between this idea and some of the work going on in project Valhalla.  So you should (also) bring those ideas there.  
>
> Also, you might consider jlink as a vehicle for doing such transformations.  
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Nov 29, 2015, at 7:11 AM, Sebastian Sickelmann <sebastian.sickelmann at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> some time ago I started a discussion on jdk8-dev [0] about a change in
>> field lookup and resolution to make changes to the visibility of fields
>> possible without losing binary compatibility. In 2011 unfortunately I
>> lost track to take my experiments[1] much further.
>>
>> Now that i get my feet wet again with some openjdk development and
>> learned (hopefully) enough about debugging the jdk with gdb and the jdk
>> itself, i started (a few days ago) my experiment again. This time in the
>> jvm itself based on the cpp-interpreter (zero) of the jdk9/hs-rt repos.
>> Hope to get a of this other type of proof of concept presentable soon.
>>
>> In the meantime I would love to get some thought about the following
>> questions/topics:
>>
>> Q1: Do you think that java(the jvm) would benefit of some way to make
>> changes to the visibility of fields in a binary compatible way?
>> Q2: Do you think that this should be handled at runtime/link-time inside
>> the vm?
>> Q3: Or do you think that this should be handled as early as possible
>> (load-time of classes) --> ex. by exchanging all field access to are not
>> in the same class(/module??) to an indy-call?
>> Q4: Or do you think that a "static prior runtime solution" should be
>> created to update "old" jars/modules?
>> Q5: If the runtime solution is your choice what to you think, should the
>> runtime behavior(lookup and linking of field) of the byte-codes
>> get,put,get-static,put-static also be changed for classes that are
>> compiled for an older jvm and where the jars/modules are signed by an
>> digital certificate?
>> Q6: If not Q5. Should it be allowed by some security-related settings?
>> Q7: What is about reflection functionality. Should this be changed to?
>> Field-Lookups, set / get value of fields?
>>
>> Hope to get some discussion started. Feel free to answer to one or more
>> from the questions / topics above.
>> If you have more questions that should be handled, you are also welcome
>> to post those.
>> Every feedback is welcome, even those you say, all this is a really bad
>> idea.
>> At least for this last mentioned type of feedback I would prefer to get
>> some reasons why you think so.
>>
>> --
>> Sebastian
>>
>> [0] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8-dev/2011-October/000199.html
>> [1]
>> https://github.com/picpromusic/incubator/tree/master/jdk/compatibleFieldAccess