Jayson Minard created FLINK-5964:
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Summary: Change TypeSerializers to allow construction of immutable types
Key: FLINK-5964
URL:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-5964 Project: Flink
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: Core
Affects Versions: 2.0.0
Reporter: Jayson Minard
Priority: Minor
If your programming language has a lot of Immutable types (and with no default constructor) Flink forces you to create new versions as read/write POJO otherwise the types are rejected by the system. In Kotlin for example, given a class and property values we can determine which constructor to call and invoke it using knowledge of default values, nullable types and which properties can be set in construction or after construction.
Flink provides no opportunity to use this model because Serializers are littered with calls to `createInstance` that are not passed any values so have no opportunity to fully inflate the object on construction.
This means that when you use Flink you throw away maybe hundreds of state objects (my worst case) and have to create Flink-only variations which becomes grunt work that adds no value.
Currently TypeExtractor isn't extendable, and all of the special cases are hard coded. It should be configured the order of checking for type information so that pluggable types can be added into the chain of analysis. For example before `analyzePojo` is called I could special case a Kotlin class returning a different TypeInformation instance. But I don't think that solves the whole problem since other TypeSerializers make assumptions and call `createInstance` on other TypeSerializers without knowing how they would want to do the construction (in the Kotlin case it would be "tell me to construct my instance and give me the list of named fields and serializers to get their values and let me decide what to do).
What is the best idea for this change? With guidance, I can work on the PR.
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