Hacker News Reader

Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

If I understand this correctly then Integer becomes a value class and every instance of it loses its object identity.

I do not have a lot of knowledge about the details but from the outset it seems like a rather bold move to me.

Java has a mechanism for Integer and Long objects caching using something that already looks like value object, cached objects can be compared using ==. hashCode of Integer already returns int, the boxed int value. Not much of value is lost.

Of particular note, all 1-byte Integers are interned, there is a pool of small Integers from -127 <-> 127 which are reused whenever possible.

I learned this the hard way, when a C++ JNI extension I was working on accidentally overwrote the pooled value for zero, and all hell broke loose...

> Integers from -127 <-> 127

The cache can be extended on startup with env var `java.lang.Integer.IntegerCache.high `

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/cc278dbb8a1ca0754d584270...

That is a nice piece piece of knowledge! We have an Integer cache in our product, and the only reason that it hangs around is that it caches 0..1024 instead of -127..128. By setting this value, we could simplify our code, ever so slightly.

Yeah - it's a bit non-intuitive you can change the value of a number.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Disgruntled-Bomb-Java-Editi...

In Python 2 you could literally do

    True = False

and of course in JavaScript

    undefined = "a string"

The terrifying part of this in Java, is that it applies program-wide, including to constants set before you changed the value

Such hacks will slowly stop working (without explicitly allowing it from the command line.)

In this example, it would throw an IllegalAccessException, because java.base doesn't open java.lang.

Doesn’t field.setAccessible(true) already throw on a modern version?

Exactly.

You can make it not throw by adding `--add-opens java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED` or similar to the command line, but breaking things like this is becoming harder.

Any project depending on Integer identity had years of warning that this change would come. Also given implicit primitive conversions and object pooling Integer isn't exaclty a prime candidate for object identity to begin with.

As far as I understood this (plus future work) will make value classes work more like structs meaning it will save memory and align memory better for things like gRPC, etc.

Wait, what? Virgil targeting the JVM does rely on that to represent vacuous arrays like `Array<void>`. That's annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com