The state that people really care about is whether or not an Rc has ownership.
Exposing the reference count will probably just confuse people.
The reference count is still exposed on RcSupport because it may be (and is, in the case of ByteBufAdaptor) needed to support implementation details.
This greatly simplifies the semantics around the const buffers.
When they can no longer be made writable, there is no longer any need for "deconstification".
I decided to call the method "makeReadOnly" to distinguish it from "asReadOnly" that is seen in ByteBuf and ByteBuffer. The latter two return read-only _views_ of the buffer, while makeReadOnly changes the state of the buffer in-place.
The const buffers of the various implementations are now able to share the underlying memory.
At least until they are forced not to.
Const buffers will behave ust like normal buffers, except they start out as read-only.
When they are made writable, or sliced, then they will allocate their own independent copy of the memory.
That way, const buffers can have their contents changed, and behave just like normal buffers.
The const-ness is a pure optimisation that should not have any externally observable behaviour.
This abstraction was only used to allow composing over both buffers and sends of buffers, but we can also do that with method overloads.
The Deref had weird semantics and consequences that didn't make much sense.
In other words, it did not pay a return on its complexity cost.
Previously the test results were only attached to passing builds, which is, like, the opposite of useful.
Also finally figured out how to nerf the local docker layer cache.
Recorded this new knowledge as make commands.
Instead use Mockito to implement the throwing behaviour on the buffers in those tests.
Sadly Mockito cannot spy or mock our Buffer implementation classes, and does not allow mocking an interface while spying on an implementation, so we have to do a more complicated dance with our mocking.
This supports more use cases.
The ensureWritable method can now amortise its allocation cost by allocating more than what is strictly necessary to satisfy the immediate call.
The bifurcate method can now split at a given offset.
Motivation:
Derefs are not necessarily their referents.
This is the case for Send, for instance.
Modification:
The Deref.isInstanceOf method is renamed to referentIsInstanceOf.
And a Send.isSendOf method has been added, that simplifies the check for sends, since it could be the case that one also needs to check if the object in question is also a Send instance.
Result:
Cleaner code that is easier to read, when working with Sends.
This fixes https://github.com/netty/netty-incubator-buffer-api/issues/46
