Out of curiosity, I looked more at StackFrameInfo, and saw: short bci is final and is only ever assigned to -1 in java code. What's up with that? Ohh, it seems to be magically frobbed in hotspot:
void java_lang_StackFrameInfo::set_bci(oop element, int value) { element->int_field_put(_bci_offset, value); } BUT: bci should not be final if hotspot magic is frobbing it. Can we add a comment explaining the magic? Also set_bci seems to disagree about the type of bci - it's trying to set an int field, but bci is a short! Also, I expected "int value" above to be "jint value" - it's a java type! I would prefer bci to be a java int, not short, so that it can hold all possible bytecode index values in a natural way, together with -1 for "invalid". Right now, -1 is ambiguous - it might mean bci == 65535. Also, I see private final byte RETAIN_CLASS_REF = 0x01; Shouldn't that be static?