binary compatibility ABI

Thu Sep 11 03:00:00 GMT 2003

On Thursday, Sep 11, 2003, at 05:31 Pacific/Auckland, Boehm, Hans wrote:
> I haven't been following this in enough detail, but:
>> Is it possible to somehow detect an uninitialized class using one of 
> the
> values that must be loaded anyway to access the field?

Yeah, if we used offsets from the class pointer to access static 
fields, then we could do that. However ...
> If you use a separate static field to check for initialization then 
> you usually
> have a memory read ordering issue between the flag read and the field 
> read.
> However if the value you test for initialization is used to compute 
> the address
> of the field itself, you still have a problem on Alpha, but on all 
> other
> architectures that we considered, the two reads appear to be ordered.

... class initialization can have other side effects besides setting 
the static fields of a class?
Regards
Bryce.