Project Valhalla, Simple as it can be, but not simpler

Value types was in the CLR(_Common_ Language Runtime) from day one as the runtime supported (variations of) C/C++,etc. Iirc proper generics didn't appear in version 1 of C# but since the foundation was there generics could become an addon in terms of new collection classes that could be properly parametrized.

Java generics took a shortcut by reusing the old classes and just layering them on in the language but erasing all useful information to the runtime, and this is what's biting them in the back now when practice has shown that flat memory layouts is highly beneficial in terms of performance as CPU speeds has outstripped memory latencies.

A List in C# will be 2 objects, the List object and the underlying int[] array of sequential numbers, a Java List will be 2+N objects, the List object, the object[] array and N boxed int objects, and the if N int objects are scattered in memory then traversing the integers will be far more expensive due to memory latencies.

I’d say that it’s backwards compatibility.

My understanding is that moving from 1.1 to 2.0 (that introduced reified generics) required work from developers of libraries.

It was also done in relative infancy of the ecosystem.

But I trust some c# oldtimer to tell me how it actually was as I only remember that some tools I used insisted to have older .net runtime installed.

First, .NET structs are flattenable but they're not value types, which are immutable and so pose further problems. But the two main challenges for adding any new big feature to Java are forward compatibility and simplicity.

1. Forward compatibility: While backward compatibility means that old code continues to run and so is easy to do (add the new feature "on the side"), forward compatibility, or migration compatibility, means making it easy for old code to take advantage of new features with little or no change.

2. Simplicity: For every feature (added to help, say, efficiency) that makes an advanced developer happy you risk scaring away ten less-advanced developers. Complex languages are also rarely taught as first languages, which makes it very hard for them to reach or remain at the very top of the most popular languages. Eventually every language faces requirements that demand a new feature that makes the language more complex, but if great care is not taken to control the added complexity as much as possible (or even give up on the feature as not being worth the cost to complexity), the languages eventually faces a threat to popularity.

While Java has always cared about these two, .NET not so much (maybe they're right not to, but in any event that's a real philosophical/cultural difference between the two platforms). For example, to make simple blocking enjoy the scalability benefits of async/await you need to change a lot of things; that wasn't acceptable for us. And MS has always been a fan of rather complex languages (with the exception of VB); as early as the late eighties MS was "the C++" company.

Now, to be more specific, one of the big challenges of value types is object initialisation, which is what John's article is primarily about. If you create an array of a value type, the elements must be initialised to some value which isn't null. How do you express that in a way that is relatively forward compatible, simple, but also efficient? Furthermore, as John points out, even for value classes that don't admit a "zero" default value, how do you express the constructor for an immutable type that can be flattened? It's easy to do this for reference records because reference types are always "published" to readers with an atomic write of the pointer, but value types (which, again, are immutable) need to initialise their fields atomically even when flattened.

BTW, generic erasure is not a big challenge. While value types will eventually (in a later phase) require specialised generics (because you want, say, an ArrayList of a complex number value type internally use a flattened array), adding that is not a huge problem for forward compatibility and simplicity because value types are invariant, i.e. they cannot subclass nor be subclassed, so the complexity and forward compatibility issues that reification brings to variant types aren't as bad (the problem with reifying generics that can be variant is that you need to bake a particular language's variance strategy into the runtime itself). Erased generics have so far helped Java much more than they hurt it because we keep seeing their forward-compatibility benefits over and over (including for future features that we're thinking about). They also help simplicity because they make the runtime an attractive compilation target for complex languages that may draw those who prefer such languages while keeping them on the platform and at the same time reducing the pressure on the Java to add complex features that could threaten its popularity among the majority who prefer simpler languages.

IMO it's worth keeping in mind that an "actually immutable" guarantee is pretty hard to enforce for value types without being willing to set aside performance, especially for interop.

At any point if you make the raw bytes accessible to someone, even if it's just to copy them somewhere, it becomes possible to mutate an immutable value and users will eventually take advantage of it, if only because they came up with a really good reason why they need to (like for example, initializing readonly values in a deserialization function).

I don't think .NET could have ever adopted true immutability for structs because the rules would be so easy to break. There are "readonly" fields but they're at best a railing to keep you from falling off - there are trivial ways to bypass those protections.

I do think immutability can be a valuable property though so it's cool to see the Java folks doing the hard work to execute on it.

How does one zoom in Vivaldi. Wouldn't that also be something similar to Cmd-Plus or Cmd-Minus (or Ctrl)?