On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Joel Borggrén-Franck <joel.fra...@oracle.com> wrote:
> IIRC The jdk contains 4 subtypes of Type. I think Peter is right here, but on > the other hand aren't uncontended volatile reads kind of cheap? Unless > someone comes back with reports of measurable slowdown I think safe > publication is ok. We can always revisit this later. I am OK with lazy non-volatile publication of immutable objects as long as we have a (reflective) test that proves we've kept all implementations correct. >> For safety's sake, I'd also like us to use CAS with our lazy-init >> fields. Perhaps use Atomic field updaters throughout the reflection >> codebase, for jdk9. >> > > What is the problem you would be solving? It's a safety thing. It's "probably" OK if a very rare race causes 2 invocations of an API to return different objects when normally the same object is returned. But it's simply safer to not do so, by CAS-ing from null to the newly computed value instead of unconditionally storing the new value. As we've seen, reflection is under-maintained and under-tested.
