I noticed some unexpected behavior (unexpected relative to my personal expectations), and I’m wondering if something if there is a bug in the JVM or if perhaps this is a fringe case where I don’t understand some of the details of what exactly is supposed to happen. Suppose we had the following code in a main method by itself:
int i;
int count = 0;
for(i=0; i < Integer.MAX_VALUE; i+=2){
count++;
}
System.out.println(i++);
A naive expectation would be that this would print Integer.MAX_VALUE-1, the largest even representable int. However, I believe integer arithmetic is supposed to “rollover” in Java, so adding 1 to Integer.MAX_VALUE should result in Integer.MIN_VALUE. Since Integer.MIN_VALUE is still less than Integer.MAX_VALUE, the loop would keep iterating through the negative even ints. Eventually it would get back to 0, and this process should repeat as an infinite loop.
When I actually run this code, I get non-deterministic results. The result that gets printed tends to be on the order of half a million, but the exact value varies. So not only is the loop terminating when I believe it should be an infinite loop, but it seems to terminate randomly. What’s going on?
My guess is that this is either a bug in the JVM, or there is a lot of funky optimization going on that makes this expected behavior. Which is it?
Known bug. Related to
https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug?bug_id=6196102
https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug?bug_id=6357214
and others.
I think they’re considered low-priority to fix because they don’t come up in the real world.