>The primary disadvantage is the increased creation of temporary >objects in current VMs.
Help me to understand this. Currently, these data structures are declared as non-final but otherwise have the same semantics (public member access). For the most part, we wouldn't be changing how they are used, so I don't understand how this would translate to creation of any more temporary objects than we currently have. What would cause additional temporary objects to be created? >Do you have any performance test cases that you use? I could put >together some changes and see what the numbers look like before and >after. Unfortunately, we don't have any unit tests that would be useful here. But I think it is reasonably safe to assume that we might see a slight performance improvement by making this change.
