Psychosomatic, Lobotomy, Saw: Wait For It: Counted/Uncounted loops, Safepoints and OSR Compilation

Psychosomatic, Lobotomy, Saw: Wait For It: Counted/Uncounted loops, Safepoints and OSR Compilation

Will get your JVM to hang and will not exit after 5 seconds, as one might expect from reading the code. The reason this happens, I claimed, is because the compiler considers for loops limited by an int to be counted, and will therefore not insert a safepoint poll into the generated assembly code. This was the theory, and I tested it, and it definitely hung on my machine ('It Works On My Machine'™).
To my great surprise, some people not only read the posts, they also run the code (it's like they don't trust me ;-) ). And 2 of those diligent readers got back to me in the comments saying that actually the JVM exists just fine. So I ran it again, and it hung, again. Then I ran it with different versions of the JVM, and it hung as I expected. Then I thought, maybe they are running the code I put on GitHub, so I tried that. That also hung when I ran it from Eclipse, but did not when I built it with Maven and ran it from the command line. EUREKA!

As it happens, Eclipse has it's own Java compiler (a fact well known to those who know it well, no doubt) and the bytecode it generated (the .class file) hung every time, but Maven uses javac and the .class file generated from that did not hang. When testing initially I was running my class inside Eclipse, or using the Eclipse .class file to run from the command line. Both .class files are valid, but different (same-same but different). We can use javap to print out class bytecode and compare ("javap -c -v -p <class file>"). For your pleasure you can find the original Java file, the 2 class files and their respective bytecode printouts on GitHub and come to your own conclusions before you continue reading.
So... is my understanding (and the Eclipse javac) somehow out of date? can this problem of telling counted loops from uncounted loops be solved by the bytecode compiler?

How is the bytecode different?

Well, mostly not that different:

1. An easy to spot difference which we can tell is semantically the same is the bytecode result for "System.out.println("How Odd:" + l);" you'll notice that Eclipse is using the constructor "java/lang/StringBuilder."<init>":(Ljava/lang/String;)" while javac is opting for "java/lang/StringBuilder."<init>":()V" followed by an append. Semantically the 2 choices are the same. We create a StringBuilder and append the String "How odd:" and the variable l. The reality is that there are subtle differences, the Eclipse version will allocate a larger char[] for instance. It may also be that the Eclipse pattern will miss out on some String concatenation optimization because the OpenJDK implementers are likely to focus on patterns generated from the official javac.
2. The loop interpretation is different. Eclipse is checking the loop conditions at the end of the loop whereas javac is building a loop with the checks upfront and the loop backedge at the end. That seems like the important difference.

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