RE: [cp-patches] [generics] RFC: VM interface changes

[Jeroen Frijters]

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 15:29 +0200, Jeroen Frijters wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Here is the first part of my proposed VM interface changes 
> to make the
> > VM interface more compatible with HEAD.
> 
> Two main comments, the rest is pretty much what I expected:
> 
> * If you change the environ() return type, then please change it to an
> array as you suggested, so it becomes more type-safe.

I was too lazy to rewrite the native code, so I backed out that change
for the time being. I also didn't know how to deal with the character
set conversion stuff (the current code uses NewStringUTF, that doesn't
look right to me). IKVM doesn't use the native code, so I don't know
much about Classpath's native code.

> The cast to List<String> is pointless as it will check against
> List anyway at run-time.

It isn't pointless, it allowed me to continue to use the "for (String s
: list)" construct, but I do understand that it doesn't actually do
anything.

> * The stubs seem to lose something.  Whereas before the type signature
> handling may have been implemented by the VM, now it will always throw
> an error even if the VM complies.  I'm okay if this is only a 
> short-term fix; I just don't like the idea of introducing such a stub
> for any noticeable length of time (i.e. the next thing should be to
> implement this).  There are already lots of places in the code where
> this is the case, and we don't really want more.

I totally agree. In this case I wanted to change the interface early on,
to express the intent to share the signature parsing code in Classpath,
instead of having different VMs go off and duplicate this effort.

Regards,
Jeroen