> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
> Brian Jones
>
> "John Keiser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > If you're talking about minimizing the impact of field name
> changes, which
> > is a separate issue, one way to do that is by introducing private
> > constructors into Classpath, such as Class().
>
> If the definition of a class has changed between the time an
> application was compiled and the time it is run then it is reasonable
> to throw an IncompatibleClassChangeError. I don't see what you're
> getting at.
>
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about field name changes
making Japhar incompatible with us.
> >From an OO perspective, there shouldn't be any direct accesses to
> instance variables of a class such as Throwable.message since that
> would make it painful for us (Classpath) to ever change that code. I
> kept on reading and saw everyone apparently wants the same thing.
>
>From an OO perspective, yes. Some of these calls can be changed to method
calls. But a few of them, String in particular, really should remain field
accesses, because a Java method call every time would be very expensive.
> > String is the only one where there are strong dependencies on internal
> > structure. You can probably get around these, but these are *strings*,
> > probably the most-used class in Java (except for Object itself), and you
> > need all the speed you can get.
>
> Speed isn't the primary goal of Japhar or Classpath.
>
I'm not saying it should be a primary goal, *but* "dog-slow" is not going to
help us much, and that's what we are if we don't implement some
optimizations. We're talking about *critical code* here. The core of the
JVM. Anything you do helps, as long as it doesn't break robustness.
> > I agree, Japhar *shouldn't* have to worry about field names in given
> > classes--but it's the sad fact of the matter. I've minimized
> it any way I
> > can.
>
> I'll have to take your word for it. :) Back to working on the rest
> of java.lang.*Error.java. Whee!
>
> Brian
> --
> |-------------------------------|Software Engineer
> |Brian Jones |[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> |[EMAIL PROTECTED] |http://www.nortel.net
> |http://www.classpath.org/ |------------------------------
>
