On 13/02/2018 11:45 AM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
On Feb 12, 2018, at 1:55 PM, David Holmes <david.hol...@oracle.com> wrote:
getNestMembers
—
"The list of nest members in the classfile is permitted to contain duplicates, or to
explicitly include the nest host. It is not required that an implementation of this
method removes these duplicates."
The "or to explicitly include the nest host” suggests it might not include the
nest host, but a prior statement says it will be present in the zeroth element.
The "or" pertains to the list of nest members in the classfile - ie the
contents of the NestMembers attribute. The returned array of nestmembers will always
contain the nesthost as the zeroeth element, but may also contain it somewhere else if
the classfile explicitly listed it in nestmembers.
I see, it’s easy to misread, well i did :-) Perhaps call out the attribute and
provide a link to the JVMS?
I can add a link to JVMS if that is what we normally do. As for
misreading ... the subject of the sentence is "The list of nest members
in the classfile". ;-)
Why the ambiguity over duplicates? is this motivated by performance? this may
just push the cost to clients that have to always remove duplicates to function
reliably and may be cause bugs if duplicates are rare and induced by certain
relationships or loading patterns. My inclination would be for the returned
array to not contain duplicates.
Yes performance. Having to check for duplicates adds a cost to every single
well formed call to this API to account for something that the specification
allows to happen but which we don't expect to happen and which javac will never
produce. This has all been discussed previously.
Ok, it’s unfortunate that the cost will be placed on the developer who has to
code defensively in case there might be duplicates i.e. the performance cost is
pushed to an unbounded set of places (or places where bugs may lurk).
There's really no expectation that the developer will need to program
defensively here as we don't expect compilers to produce such
classfiles. But I, for one, prefer a "user pays" scheme over an
"everyone pays" scheme (which is what disallowing duplicates would also be).
David
Paul.
