Hi,
After so many years of accepting null, throwing NPE would an
incompatible change
and break existing uses.
Documenting it as ill advised or useless is would be a useful caution.
Regards, Roger
On 7/9/18 3:59 PM, Per Liden wrote:
On 2018-07-09 20:49, mandy chung wrote:
On 7/9/18 11:31 AM, Zheka Kozlov wrote:
It is possible to create a WeakReference/SoftReference/PhantomReference
with a null value in which case the Reference will never be
enqueued. This
is quite obvious (since null cannot be weakly/softly/phantom
reachable).
But I think it's worth being mentioned in the JavaDoc. What do you
think?
Alternatively, the constructor should require non-null referent and
throws NPE if null.
I created https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8206933 to track
this.
It's not completely obvious to me that throwing NPE or otherwise
blocking this is the right thing to do. Sure, creating a Reference
with a null referent seems pretty useless, but it's also very similar
to creating a Reference and immediately calling its clear() method,
which is perfectly valid (and equally useless).
Are you saying we should block this because we can easily detect this
particular case/misuse, as opposed to the immediately-called-clear
case? Or is there some other rationale?
cheers,
Per
