Covariant overrides on the Buffer Hierachy (original) (raw)

Richard Warburton richard.warburton at gmail.com
Mon Apr 21 21:51:40 UTC 2014

Hi Peter,

I'm suggesting this alternative, because Buffer methods can stay final in this case. This is more JIT-friendly. And, if I'm not mistaken, client code compiled using JDK8 onto which this API change was backported, would still run with JDK8 (or JDK7 when compiled with -target 1.7) onto which the API change was not back-ported.

Thanks for suggesting this alternative. I think there are a few downsides to this approach as well though.

  1. Anyone with code referring to 'ByteBuffer' now gets rawtype generics errors.
  2. Anyone with -Werror (like openjdk!) now fails to compile.
  3. This is a more complex change than the one I was proposing and smaller, simpler, changes seem to be less risky.
  4. Developers do genuinely get confused by generics. Not a reason not to use them ever but a good reason not to introduce them if the issue can be solved by an alternative approach.

Happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood anything ;)

regards,

Richard Warburton

http://insightfullogic.com @RichardWarburto <http://twitter.com/richardwarburto>

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