On 5/5/16 6:42 AM, Chris Hegarty wrote:
I have some sympathy for this. Since we are specifying that these
Collections are serializable, it would be nice for them to deserialize
on an older release, but I don’t think we should compromise the
serial form to achieve that. In fact, I agree with Stephen, I think we
should go the same way as that of the serial form of 310 classes.
So is there anything we can do for serial interoperability? What if,
we agree the serial form and the private supporting implementation
types in 9 ( say, some time this month ). Backport these to, at least,
8u, where they do not impact spec and are benign. JDK 9 is not
scheduled to ship until March 2017, with the regular Critical Patch
Updates that most vendors provide, I’d bet that a large number of
8u’s in production at that time would contain the required types to
deserialize these collections. There’s no guarantee of course, but
in practical terms at least we made a reasonable effort.
Interesting approach.
One could backport just the serial proxy and then have its readResolve()
instantiate its existing collections wrapped with unmodifiable wrappers. Or, one
could just backport the immutable implementations. There's not much code to
backport.
I guess the question is whether this is worth it. Is this something we know will
happen, or would it be done "just in case" ?
s'marks
