[Isolate-interest] Shared Memory ?

[Ernst, Matthias]

Hi,

I'm musing about java-to-java/java-to-native, shared memory,
inter-process communication. Is stuff like that on the list of things
you see as a possible Java feature?

I imagine an API for
* creating/deleting shared-memory descriptors
* attaching to a shared-memory descriptor, yielding a DirectByteBuffer
* an extension of j.u.c.atomic to support atomic instructions on such
areas
* basic IPC abstractions on top

I guess a small JNI library + sun.misc.Unsafe might already go a long
way. Well, I just see there's no intrinsic like
sun.misc.Unsafe.compareAndSwap*(long address, expectedValue, newValue)
(the existing methods all take an object). Or is there?

What do you think? I'm thinking of some sort of crash-resilient, shared
area for a set of VMs. Well, ideally that area would be a
garbage-collected heap but let's stay realistic. Gemstone's been
offering something like that for a while.

I see this might be complementary to the isolate effort.

Matthias