On Dec 12, 2017, at 5:24 PM, David Holmes <david.hol...@oracle.com> wrote: > > as per getByteCodeIndex() it needs to be able to store "-1" to indicate > no-bci?
Yes, that's the essential requirement, to encode a "none" value. FWIW, one natural way to do that here would be to make the int field @Stable and have the accessor return one less than the stored field value. Then, by the rules of @Stable, the field starts out at the logical value of -1, and can transition to a valid BCI if patched to a non-zero value in the range 1..(2^16). Making it "final" and initialized to -1 is not too terrible either, although that creates some tech. debt we need to discharge when upgrading finals to be trustable. — John
