On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 12:51 PM Brian Goetz <brian.go...@oracle.com> wrote:
> > Another option that gets some of the benefit and doesn't require a > > spec change is to omit the reference to the enclosing instance if it > > is unused. We've been doing that successfully for a few years at > > Google. There was some minor compatibility impact to code using > > reflection to access the synthetic field that stores the reference to > > the enclosing instance, but that was very rare, and the benefit is > > that it avoids some memory leaks. > > The people who would complain are in a pretty weak position: > > - The field is private and synthetic; you shouldn't be reflecting on > it at all; > - The field name is an implementation detail of the compiler, and not > specified, so you shouldn't even pretend you know its name; > - If its your class, the easy thing to do is add an accessor, so the > only people who would complain are those that are breaking into classes > they don't control. > > I think it is reasonable for the language to infer whether the enclosing > instance is "captured" by the inner class or not, and that's consistent > with how lambdas behave. > Thanks, that all sounds right to me. I filed https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8271623 to track that enhancement.
