On 1/28/15 7:07 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
On 27/01/2015 04:37, Mandy Chung wrote:
System.runFinalizationOnExit has been deprecated since 1998 (JDK 1.2)
and this method is inherently unsafe. I am thinking to propose this method
in JDK 9 to throw UnsupportedOperationException.
I believe it's rare for existing applications using
System.runFinalizationOnExit.
My analysis on Maven Central ~315K artifacts that show about ~15 unique
artifacts calling System.runFinalizationOnExit while they all come from
only 5 classes.
Any thought/feedback?
It's broken in other ways beyond what is in the @deprecated note so I don't
think it's much of a loss to finally disable it. I don't know if you have come
up with candidate wording to replace the existing wording but having it
reference the shutdown hooks and the ref API might be useful.
As I understand it, it's not System.runFinalizationOnExit() *itself* that's
unsafe, it's the act of running finalizers on still-reachable objects at exit
time that's unsafe.
A potential alternative would thus be to change the method call to be a no-op,
and just disable the running of finalizers at exit time. This would let us
remove the unsafe behavior, and it avoids forcing people to recompile code that
calls rFOE.
Clearly, this would be a silent change in behavior, which is usually something
we want to avoid. But the calling code can't tell the difference anyway. This is
to be traded off against potential forced recompiles, which don't add much value
beyond notification, but which may be inconvenient or even impractical in some
cases. I'm not sure of the right tradeoff here.
s'marks
