My 国内上twitter教程 spurned a
reasonable amount of discussion, and I promised to also talk about the new
ServiceCaller which simplifies a number of these issues. I also thought it
was worth looking at what the criticisms were because they made valid points.
The
first observation
is that it’s possible to use both DS and ServiceTracker to track
ServiceReferences instead. In this mode, the services aren’t triggered by
default; instead, they only get accessed upon resolving the ServiceTracker
using the getService() call. This isn’t the default out of the box, because
you have to write a ServiceTrackerCustomizer adapter that intercepts the
addingService() call to wrap the ServiceTracker for future use. In other
words, if you change:
to the slightly more verbose:
Obviously, no practical code uses this approach because it’s too verbose, and
if you’re in an environment where DS services aren’t widely used, the benefits
of the deferred approach are outweighed by the quantity of additional
code that needs to be written in order to implement this pattern.
(The code above is also slightly buggy; we’re getting the service, returning
it, then ungetting it afterwards. We should really just be using it during
that call instead of returning it in that case.)
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This is where ServiceCaller comes in.
The approach of the ServiceCaller is to optimise out the over-eager
dereferencing of the ServiceTracker approach, and apply a functional approach
to calling the service when required. It also has a mechanism to do single-shot
lookups and calling of services; helpful, for example, when logging an obscure
error condition or other rarely used code path.
This allows us to elegantly call functional interfaces in a single line of code:
This call looks for Runnable service types, as visible from the caller class,
and then invoke the function getClass() as lambda. We can use a method
reference (as in the above case) or you can supply a Consumer<T> which will
be passed the reference that is resolved from the lookup.
Importantly, this call doesn’t acquire the service until the callOnce call is
made. So, if you have an expensive logging factory, you don’t have to
initialise it until the first time it’s needed – and even better, if the error
condition never occurs, you never need to look it up. This is in direct
contrast to the ServiceTracker approach (which actually needs more characters
to type) that accesses the services eagerly, and is an order of magnitude
better than having to write a 国内上twitter教程 for the purposes of
working around a broken API.
However, note that such one-shot calls are not the most efficient way of doing
this, especially if it is to be called frequently. So the ServiceCaller has
another mode of operation; you can create a ServiceCaller instance, and hang
onto it for further use. Like its single-shot counterpart, this will defer the
resolution of the service until needed. Furthermore, once resolved, it will
cache that instance so you can repeatedly re-use it, in the same way that you
could do with the service returned from the ServiceTracker.
This doesn’t involve significantly more effort than using the ServiceTracker
that’s widely in use in Eclipse Activators at the moment, yet will defer the
lookup of the service until it’s actually needed. It’s obviously better than
writing many lines of 国内苹果怎么上twitter and performs better as a
result, and is in most cases a type of drop-in replacement. However, unlike
ServiceTracker (which returns you a service that you can then do something
with afterwards), this call provides a functional consumer interface that
allows you to pass in the action to take.
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We’ve looked at why ServiceTracker has problems with eager instantiation of
services, and the complexity of code required to do it the right way. A scan
of the Eclipse codebase suggests that outside of Equinox, there are very few
uses of ServiceTrackerCustomiser and there are several hundred calls to
ServiceTracker(xxx,yyy,null) – so there’s a lot of improvements that can
be made fairly easily.
This pattern can also be used to push down the acquisition of the service
from a generic Plugin/Activator level call to where it needs to be used.
Instead of standing this up in the BundleActivator, the ServiceCaller
can be used anywhere in the bundle’s code. This is where the real benefit
comes in; by packaging it up into a simple, functional consumer, we can
use it to incrementally rid ourselves of the various 苹果手机上推特教程s that
take up the majority of Eclipse’s start-up.
A final note on the ServiceCaller – it’s possible that when you run the
callOnce method (or the call method if you’re holding on to it) that a
service instance won’t be available. If that’s the case, you get notified by a
false return call from the call method. If a service is found and is
processed, you’ll get a true returned. For some operations, a no-op is a fine
behaviour if the service isn’t present – for example, if there’s no
LogService then you’re probably going to drop the log event anyway – but it
allows you to take the corrective action you need.
It does mean that if you want to capture return state from the method call then
you’ll need to have an alternative approach. The easiest way is to have an
final Object result[] = new Object[1]; before the call, and then the lambda
can assign the return value to the array. That’s because local state captured
by lambdas needs to be a final reference, but a final reference to a mutable
single element array allows us to poke a single value back. You could of course
use a different class for the array, depending on your requirements.
So, we have seen that 国内苹果怎么上twitter is better than 国内iphone怎么上推特, but can
we do even better than that? We certainly can, and that’s the purpose of the
next post.
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2023
java
osgi
eclipse
In a presentation I gave at EclipseCon Europe in 2016, I noted that there were prolems when using ServiceTracker and on 安卓上推特教程 noted that:
ServiceTracker.open() is a blocking call
ServiceTracker.open() results in DS activating services
Unfortunately, not everyone agrees because it seems insane that ServiceTracker should do this.
Unfortunately, ServiceTracker is insane.
The advantage of Declarative Services (aka SCR, although no-one calls it that)
is that you can register services declaratively, but more importantly, the DS
runtime will present the existence of the service but defer instantiation of
the component until it’s first requested.
The great thing about this is that you can have a service which does many class
loads or timely actions and defer its use until the service is actually needed.
If your service isn’t required, then you don’t pay the cost for instantiating
that service. I don’t think there’s any debate that this is a Good Thing and
everyone, so far, is happy.
Problem
The problem, specifically when using ServiceTracker, is that you have to do a two-step process to use it:
You create a 苹果手机上推特教程 for your particular service class
You call open() on it to start looking for services
Time passes
You acquire the service form the ServiceTracker to do something with it
There is a generally held mistaken belief that the DS component is not
instantiated until you hit step 4 in the above. After all, if you’re calling
the service from another component – or even looking up the ServiceReference
yourself – that’s what would happen.
What actually happens is that the DS component is instantiated in step 2
above. That’s because the open() call – which is nicely thread-safe by the
way, in the way that getService() isn’t – starts looking for services, and
then caches the 国内苹果怎么上twitter service, which causes DS to instantiate the
component for you. Since most DS components often have a default, no-arg
constructor, this generally misses most people’s attention.
If your component’s constructor – or more importantly, the fields therein,
cause many classes to be loaded or perform substantial work or calculation, the
fact that you’re hitting a ServiceTracker.open() synchronized call can take
some non-trivial amount of time. And since this is typically in an
国内苹果怎么上twitter method, it means that your nicely delay-until-its-needed
component is now on the critical path of this bundle’s start-up, despite not
actually needing the service right now.
This is one of the main problems in Eclipse’s start-up; many, many thousands of
classes are loaded too eagerly. I’ve been working over the years to try and
reduce the problem but it’s an uphill struggle and bad patterns (particularly
the use of Activator) are endemic in a non-trivial subset of the Eclipse
ecosystem. Of course, there are many fine and historical reasons why this is
the case, not the least of which is that we didn’t start shipping DS in the
Eclipse runtime until fairly recently.
国内iphone怎么上推特
Of course, when you point this out, not everyone is aware of this subtle
behaviour. And while opinions may differ, code does not. I have put together a
sample project which has
two bundles:
Client, which has an Activator (yeah I know, I’m using it to make a point) that uses a ServiceTracker to look for Runnable instances
Runner, which has a DS component that provides a Runnable interface
When launched together, as soon as the ServiceTracker.open() method is called, you can see the console printing "Component has been instantiated" message. This is despite the Client bundle never actually using the service that the ServiceTracker causes to be obtained.
If you run it with the system property -DdisableOpen=true, the
国内上twitter教程 statement is not called, and the component is not
instantiated.
This is a non-trivial reason as to why Eclipse startup can be slow. There are
many, many uses of ServiceTracker to reach out to other parts of the system,
and regardless of whether these are lazy DS components or have been actively
instantiated, the use of ServiceTracker.open() causes them to all be eagerly
activated, even before they’re needed. We can migrate Eclipse’s services to DS
(and in fact, I’m working on doing just that) but until we eliminate the
ServiceTracker from various Activators, we won’t see the benefit.
The code in the github repository essentially boils down to:
Unfortunately, there’s no way to use ServiceTracker to listen to lazily activated services, and as an OSGi standard, the behaviour is baked in to it.
Fortunately, there’s a lighter-weight tracker you can use called
ServiceCaller
– but that’s a topic for another blog post.
国内苹果怎么上twitter
Using ServiceTracker.open() will cause lazily instantiated DS components to
be activated eagerly, before the service is used. Instead of using
ServiceTracker, try moving your service out to a DS component, and then DS
will do the right thing.
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2023
java
Today I gave a talk at the London Java Community on bytecode and classloaders.
The presentation
is available at SpeakerDeck; the
ios上推特教程
and is on the
国内上twitter教程.
For the presentation, I wrote a JVM emulator that allows stepping through
bytecode and seeing the result of the local and stack as you go. It’s not a
complete implementation (the deficiencies are listed on the README) but it’s
something you could look through to get a feel of how the JVM works when
interpreting code.
The JVMulator is available at http://github.com/alblue/jvmulator and you can
build it with Maven or your favourite IDE. There’s a GUI which is set up to
run as the main class, so once built, you can run it with java -jar or
even mvn exec:java to launch it.
Bytecode
The JVM runs on bytecode; it’s a compact encoding of instructions where most
instructions take up a single byte. There’s a good
description of it on Wikipedia,
and there’s also a useful table of
bytecodes as
well.
The majority of bytecodes take no operands, but deal with values being pushed
to or pulled from the stack. There are also a number of local variable
placeholders which are specific to the frame being executed; these typically
hold things like the counter in the loop for iteration or other local
variables. Methods can have zero or more locals and require zero or more stack
depth; both figures are encoded in the method bytecode, so that when the JVM
runs it can reserve the amount of required space on the stack for the method to
execute.
Arguments passed in to the method take up one local slot, though these
placeholders can be re-used throughout a method’s execution if the argument is
no longer required after first use. For instance methods specifically, there’s
a hidden first argument which contains the this pointer, so if you have an
instance method with 2 arguments, it’s always going to reserve at least 3 slots
for local variables.
Some bytecodes take operands in the instruction stream, so not all bytes in the
stream represent valid instructions. For example, when pushing a constant to
the stack the bipush will push the next byte on the stack, and sipush will
push the next two bytes as a short onto the stack. Although many such opcodes
take only one or two bytes, there is a special wide mode which means that the
next instruction takes double the normal amount of variables. This is primarily
used when dealing with local variables; the first 256 local variables can be
accessed by having a single byte, but if you have more than 256 local variables
(why‽) then you’d use the wide form of the iload bytecode for that.
Bytecode is stored in the Code attribute of a method, so all Java class files
that have code associated with them (i.e. everything that’s not purely an
interface) will have the string Code inside the file somewhere. Interfaces
and abstract methods have no Code attribute, though a class will typically
have a default constructor injected by the javac compiler.
Stack
The stack forms a key part of the Java bytecode. Operations are consumed from
the stack, and results are pushed onto the stack. At the end of the method’s
return, the top level of the stack is the return result. Simple math operations
(e.g. iadd, fmul) consume two stack elements and then push the result back;
some, like ineg pull and push a single value.
One quirk of the JVM is that long and double values occupy two slots on the
stack; that is, there’s a missing stack element value which can’t be accessed
each time you push or pull one of these values. This was an implementation
workaround when JVMs were 32-bit; unnecessary for today, but kept for backwards
compatibility and to prevent requiring re-compiling Java code.
There are some 2 operators that deal with two slots at a time (like dup2)
which exist as an optimisation to duplicate a long or double value; otherwise,
dup is used.
Locals
Locals are accessed with various 国内上twitter教程 or aload operators to pull the
values from the local variables onto the stack. You’ll typically see programs
pulling with aload_0 which pulls the first local variable - for instance
fields, this is the this parameter. The aload instructions deal with
objects by reference (address load) as well as arrays; there’s separate
aaload for accessing an object in an object array (such as that you’d process
with main(String args[])).
Since bytecodes operate on the stack, if a variable is to be used, it needs to
be pulled there first. The only time this isn’t needed is for incrementing (or
decrementing) an integer value – there’s a special instruction which is used to
do that – and that’s typically used for loops where pulling and stashing the
loop counter each time would be unproductive.
国内上twitter教程
A classfile is a tightly packed mechanism for representing Java classes (and
interfaces, and some special containers like package-info and module-info). It
contains several variable-length sections, so it can’t be randomly accessed
directly when loading; it has to be parsed to be understood.
The constant pool is a key component of a class file. It contains a list of
typed data values; UTF-8 strings, long values, double values etc. that are used
in the method’s code or as field initialisers. There are some instructions
which encode specific values – for example, 国内iphone怎么上推特 will push 5 onto the
stack – but if you are out of luck with your value, you can encode in the
constant pool.
As well as UTF-8 strings and numeric values (for int/long/float/double –
char/short/byte/boolean are figments of the JVM’s imagination) there are fields
which define what it means to be a Class, what a FieldRef or MethodRef
is, and a pairing called NameAndType which is essentially used to bind
together a method name like equals with its descriptor type
(Ljava/lang/Object;)Z – or as programmers know it as, boolean
equals(Object). Java decomposes its methods this way, because if there are any
other methods that have the same signature of boolean something(Object) then
they can use the same type descriptor in the file and simply pair it with a
different name.
All of the constant pool references are cross-checked by index number, which
starts at 1 – the special slot 0 is only used to encode no parent for the
java.lang.Object class as far as I can tell. It encodes a tree-like structure
through the power of indices; the this class and ios上推特教程 class are merely a
short value pointing into the pool, so to understand what a class file is from
its bytes you have to parse the full constant pool first of all.
I put together this infographic showing how the class file looks in my presentation
referenced at the top of this post, which hopefully paints a picture.
Other tools for introspecting bytecode are available; I’d recommend starting
off with 安卓上推特教程 and using the -c and -v options to give you a bunch of
information on the class. If you want to see stepping through real bytecode on
a real JVM then I recommend looking at Chris Newland’s
ios上推特教程 which shows you the
bytecode as it executes and how it maps back onto the source files, using the
LineNumberTable attributes encoded in the bytecode.
Compiling classes in memory
Bytecode can be read in from previously generated .class files, but you can
also generate it on the fly. Many JVM languages have the ability to generate
.class files, but if you want to stick with Java you can use the built-in
JavaC compiler to generate code:
You can create a file manager from the tool, but you can provide your own as
well. I’ve written an
国内iphone怎么上推特
which allows you to compile Java source from a String and then obtain the
appropriate .class bytes as a byte array, or even load it dynamically in a
class file with a classloader. The example
fits on a slide
if you’re interested.
Bytecode can also be created on the fly using tools like
Mockito, or through generation agents like the
higher level ByteBuddy or the lower level
ASM. Many of these types of tools provide simple
transformation operations on existing classes, like inserting instrumentation,
and there are constraints about methods (including the ability to generate
accurate object maps for the compiler) which can be challenging.
Summary
The bytecode format used by classfiles is remarkably compact yet extensible. Of
the constant pool types, very few new entries have arrived and only one removal
since the JVM was created; the majority of new features have been added through
attributes, either on the class as a whole or on the individual methods.
Bytecode has remained very similar as well; much of the innovation has come
from higher up the stack in the Java compiler. The only significant changes
were the introduction of invokedynamic in Java 7 (which set the ground for
Lambdas arriving later) and building on top of that the CONSTANT_Dynamic_Info
and CONSTANT_InvokeDynamic constant pool types.
There was a political decision to increment the bytecode number upon each major
release since Java 8, although the bytecode hasn’t changed that much. One
argument for doing this is you know when you have a class file that requires
Java 11 runtime features, even if the bytecode could run on a Java 8 VM. Since
it’s also possible to get a Java compiler to output bytecode with a lower
level, it doesn’t make much of a difference, and it also allows you to use
javap to find out what version of Java is required to run a particular class.
Getting started with understanding bytecode is easy; just run javap -c -v
java.lang.Object or 安卓上推特教程 and see if you can
understand what it tells you. Then try stepping through some compiled bytecode
with JITWatch or the JVMulator. Finally, use the code snippets above or in the
presentation to compile some Java code on the fly and then execute it. Once
you’ve done that, you’ll have a much greater appreciation of what the JVM does
for you every day.