A related issue is that we want a word for describing which types are routinely
flattened in layouts, and specialized in generics (the criteria are the same).
Currently:
- References and nullable projections of values (V?) are erased and not
flattened
- Values (zero-default and null-default) are specializable and flattenable
(This thread is for terminology; if you have questions about the above claims,
make a new thread, or better, wait for the more detailed writeup explaining why
this is.)
We need words for these two things too.
> On Apr 8, 2019, at 2:58 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.go...@oracle.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, that’s a promising direction. And this is surely the motivation why the
> C# folks picked “struct”; they wanted to carry the connotation that this is a
> structure that is inlined. Problem is, the word “struct” is already so
> heavily polluted by what it means in C. So perhaps something like:
>
> inline class V { … }
>
> This says than a V can be inlined into things that contain a V — other
> classes and arrays. It also kind of suggests that this thing has no
> intrinsic identity.
>
> A possible downside of this choice is that one might mistake it for meaning
> “its methods are inlined”. Which is actually a little true, in that the
> methods are implicitly static and therefore more amenable to dynamic
> inlining. So that might actually be OK.
>
> Others?
>
>> On Apr 8, 2019, at 2:25 PM, Kevin Bourrillion <kev...@google.com
>> <mailto:kev...@google.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I'd suggest the name should in some way allude to the inline/compact/flat
>> memory layout, because that is the distinguishing feature of these new
>> things compared to anything else you can do in Java. And it is what people
>> should be thinking about as they decide whether a new class should use this.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 10:02 AM Brian Goetz <brian.go...@oracle.com
>> <mailto:brian.go...@oracle.com>> wrote:
>> The slide deck contains a list of terminology. I’d like to posit that the
>> most confusion-reducing thing we could do is come up with another word for
>> value types/classes/instances, since the word “value” is already used to
>> describe primitives and references themselves. This is a good time to see
>> if there are better names available.
>>
>> So for this thread only, we’re turning on the syntax light to discuss what
>> might be a better name for the abstraction currently known as “value
>> classes”.
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Mar 29, 2019, at 12:08 PM, John Rose <john.r.r...@oracle.com
>> > <mailto:john.r.r...@oracle.com>> wrote:
>> >
>> > This week I gave some presentations of my current thinking
>> > about specializations to people (from Oracle and IBM) gathered
>> > in Burlington. Here it is FTR. If you read it you will find lots
>> > of questions, as well as requirements and tentative answers.
>> >
>> > http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/pres/201903-TemplateDesign.pdf
>> > <http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/pres/201903-TemplateDesign.pdf>
>> >
>> > This is a checkpoint. I have more tentative answers on the
>> > drawing board that didn't fit into the slide deck. Stay tuned.
>> >
>> > — John
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Kevin Bourrillion | Java Librarian | Google, Inc. | kev...@google.com
>> <mailto:kev...@google.com>
