Request for review: 8004698: Implement Core Reflection for Type Annotations (original) (raw)

Joel Borggrén-Franck joel.franck at oracle.com
Tue Jan 22 17:08:46 UTC 2013

Hi,

On Jan 22, 2013, at 6:01 PM, Peter Levart <peter.levart at gmail.com> wrote:

On 01/22/2013 01:47 PM, Joel Borggrén-Franck wrote:

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your comments, see inline, On 01/19/2013 06:11 PM, Peter Levart wrote:

I see, there is a dilema how to cache type annotations. To satisfy single-annotation-returning methods and repeating annotation logic, a HashMap would be a logical choice, but it has much bigger footprint than simple arrays of annotations...

I don't prioritize footprint for classes that have runtime visible type annotations. Those classes should be very few, and as a user you are making an explicit choice of adding metadata when you use runtime visible (type) annotations. So here is my list of priorities (and by un-annotated I mean without runtime visible annotations): - Unannotated classes/fields/methods should have as small as possible extra footprint, this is most important. Hello Joel, I imagine there will be additional places where references to Map<Class<? extends Annotation>, Annotation> will be added to hold cached annotations. To satisfy your priority #1 I would consistently make sure that when there are no annotations to put into the map, a singleton Collections.emptyMap() reference is put in place. This is currently not so for regular annotations (should be corrected). I know of runtime tools that "scan" classes for particular annotations, just to find out that majority of them are without annotations. If empty instances of HashMap(16) pop-up as a result of such scan, lots of memory is wasted.

Good suggestion.

- Classes/fields/methods without type annotations should have negligible footprint over classes/fields/methods with only regular annotations. You meant "Classes/fields/methods with type annotations should have negligible footprint over classes/fields/methods with only regular annotations", right?

No :)

As I suspect class/filed/methods with runtime visible regular annotations will be 100x (or 1000x??) more common than with runtime visible type annotations the most common scenario will be

  1. No annotations
  2. Only regular annotations

So there should be very little overhead from having no type annotations. IE in the order of an extra pointer that is null.

cheers /Joel

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