Jeroen Frijters wrote: > Archie Cobbs wrote: > > Dumb question.. why wouldn't it work to just use a > > WeakHashMap instead of a HashMap in all those places? > > Not a dumb question at all. That *would* work. The "problem" > is that (at least on some runtimes) WeakHashMap is much more > expensive than this approach.
Actually, it would not work in all cases. For serialization it would work, because there the key is a Class instance, but for both Proxy and ResourceBundle, the key is more complex, so it wouldn't work to directly use a WeakHashMap (you'd have to add a layer of indirection, effectively keeping a separate cache per class loader and in that case this approach is arguably better). There may be other reasons, Roman also didn't like to use a WeakHashMap, but I didn't ask why. Using a WeakHashMap would also make it a little harder to implement the ResourceBundle LRU policy, but that was not the motivation for this approach. Regards, Jeroen
