Hi, Let's briefly recap. The arguments for the initializer I heard so far are (correct me if I miss anything):
1. It's not custom import policy! 2. It provides developers a way to perform initialization in a module after validation succeeds but before the module instance is ready. 3. It provides developers a way to be informed when a module is released, so the module could potentially deny future requests, if it chooses to. As I mentioned already, I think what has been suggested so far is not unreasonable. What I was arguing is not whether such support is useful at all by any means, but more specifically whether such support is useful outside the container environment. What I am concerned with in particular are a few issues: a. whether initialize() can access other imported modules As we briefly mentioned, this could be problematic in some situations, e.g. cyclic dependencies. Because of that, I don't think the module system should/could guarantee that an initializer will always be able to access its imported modules. To be more specific, which imported modules are accessible by the initializer will likely be determined by the states of the module instances in the module system and will also depend on the actual module system implementation (and things get much more complicated if there are other module systems in the picture). In some situations, the set of accessible imported modules from the initializer could be none. I suggest that we should not make such guarantee in the module system at all. b. cleanup resources in release() when the module instance is released As we also discussed, this could be problematic if a module cleans up itself while its classloader is still accessible by other modules. It is possible that some developers might want to do implement something like (3) above in their modules, but I don't think this is what most modules outside the containers should do. I suggest we should make the potential issues obvious to developers in the documentation, and also discourage developers to use it as a general cleanup mechanism, unless they know what they are doing of course. If the EG still thinks that the initializer support is important and also if we have consensus on the suggestions I made above, I will incorporate this into the next revision of the specification. - Stanley
