Comment by lowbloodsugar

It seems to me that the "and a null flag" is adding a tremendous amount of unneeded complexity. Supporting null seems to be about avoiding C#'s ref/in/out solution. I suppose that, from a JDK dev's perspective, that's a reasonable requirement. I just hope that we actually get non-null.

I'm not sure the no-tearing rule is particular helpful either. Like, this is something folks get wrong all the time in regular java. There's plenty of places where we use unsynchronized classes and expect synchronization to occur in the containing class or other explicit lock. If atomic operations are a requirement, and non-atomic value types get turned into references, then value types seem pointless.

I fear we're getting something called "Value types" with none of the actual benefits of value types. Like "we heard you want something called value types so here you are". No, we wanted a way to declare arrays of structured values without having to deref pointers, or to store structures inline as a field within an object. What I've read seems to be not that unless the structure's total size is 63 bits...