----------------------------------------
> Subject: Re: Another weaving problem?
> From: [email protected]
> Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 19:55:35 +0100
> To: [email protected]
>
>
>
> Alasdair Nottingham
>
> On 3 Jun 2011, at 19:32, Kevan Miller wrote:
>
> >
> > On Jun 3, 2011, at 12:55 PM, Alasdair Nottingham wrote:
> >
> >> On 3 June 2011 16:29, Kevan Miller wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Jun 3, 2011, at 11:10 AM, David Jencks wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I'm tired of being in the middle of this. Please discuss this on the owb
> >>>> dev list or in comments to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OWB-579
> >>>
> >>> :)
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>> The problem in owb is that although the actual proxy building code has
> >>>> no problems with the final synthetic methods, there's an excessively
> >>>> naive check for proxyability that just looks at all declared methods and
> >>>> checks they aren't final. Based on this example, I think there may be a
> >>>> lot of existing code with similar errors that works fine in most
> >>>> situations but will not work with aries.
> >>>
> >>> I'm worried about this, also.
> >>>
> >>> IIUC, complexity has been added to detect the classes so that we can make
> >>> these methods 'final' -- not for semantic understanding, but in the hopes
> >>> of improved JIT behavior. As you note, there is the potential that this
> >>> will cause incompatibilities/problems with other libraries.
> >>
> >> I think Richard gave other reasons as to why these methods should be
> >> marked final. So it isn't just around performance.
> >
> > Richard gave a reason for why someone might want to make a method final. I
> > don't think he was saying anything specific (one way or another) about
> > *these* specific methods.
> >
>
> I think he meant to. Although at this point we need him to come back and
> clarify.
>
I also made this point a while back, though it hasn't been referenced since.
Re-including the relevant parts of the email I sent earlier.
<snip>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like to quickly point out that the method
java.lang.reflect.Method#isSynthetic() gives you access to the synthetic flag
in a very easy way.
My understanding from JIT implementors has always been that final is a good
thing for performance. I also like the additional safety it adds to the proxy
code, preventing us accidentally overriding our own implementations.
I do think overriding synthetic methods when proxying is a reasonably bad idea,
similarly for bridge methods, which I imagine are also overridden. Intercepting
these calls gives the wrong behaviour unless you are extremely careful.
Obviously I'm not part of the OWB discussion, and they may be making valid
points. For clarity we avoid weaving/overriding synthetic, static, private,
bridge, abstract or native modified methods in Aries code.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
</snip>
The proxy weaving code is as minimally invasive as we could make it, one of the
ways we did that was to implement as much of the WovenProxy code as we could at
the top of the class hierarchy, inheriting it all the way down. This also makes
sure we don't end up with broken proxys that use one dispatcher/listener for
some methods and another for other methods. When working together Richard and I
chose to make these implementations final for three main reasons.
1. To ensure we weren't adding the methods multiple times
2. To make it less likely someone would accidentally start adding the methods
multiple times when maintaining the proxy code
3. Because it improves performance
I'm pretty certain that Richard was trying to highlight points 1 and 2, which
were lost among the other points in my original mail.
Regards,
Tim
> > --kevan
