Hi! I'm the author of the paper referenced by this post and let me start off by saying that you're right in that the paper didn't do justice to Quasar. I kindly apologies for this. I actually did want to revise that section before submitting, but as usual, the deadline came first and that section remained in my opinion one of the most "hand-wavy" ones.
Mostly the comment about "adding complexity", comes from my own biased experience of working with bytecode instrumentation. I work on the JRebel team @ZeroTurnaround and as you can imagine, we have to do quite a bit of instrumentation to get this nice reloading behaviour. Though as Murphy's law states, if something can go wrong it will and if something goes wrong after instrumentation then debugging it will not be a pleasant task. Which of course doesn't mean that it can't work nicely eventually, proven by our large number of happy customers.
Quasar's own documentation states that "If you forget to mark a method as suspendable ... you will encounter some strange errors. These will usually take the form of non-sensical ClassCastExceptions, NullPointerExceptions, or SuspendExecution being thrown". I think forgetting something is a very human thing to do and when you've got a large codebase then debugging such exceptions is what I meant by "adding complexity". But again this was only a speculation.
Regarding the other comment about shared mutable state, then of course it isn't necessarily required and I did write in the summary that "Java and the JVM provide enough tools to retrofit any concurrency model out there, but retrofitting anything won’t be the same as taking it into the initial design", which I do think still holds and I believe is one of the reasons why using libraries like Quasar won't be a trouble free experience, at least not until it's somewhat built into the JVM.
Though I won't even try to claim to know the ultimate truth and I'm always grateful to have someone correct me when I'm wrong. I appreciate your efforts in trying to make the JVM a better/more versatile platform with Quasar. I think that any such bold undertaking will only benefit the ecosystem in the long run.
Mostly the comment about "adding complexity", comes from my own biased experience of working with bytecode instrumentation. I work on the JRebel team @ZeroTurnaround and as you can imagine, we have to do quite a bit of instrumentation to get this nice reloading behaviour. Though as Murphy's law states, if something can go wrong it will and if something goes wrong after instrumentation then debugging it will not be a pleasant task. Which of course doesn't mean that it can't work nicely eventually, proven by our large number of happy customers.
Quasar's own documentation states that "If you forget to mark a method as suspendable ... you will encounter some strange errors. These will usually take the form of non-sensical ClassCastExceptions, NullPointerExceptions, or SuspendExecution being thrown". I think forgetting something is a very human thing to do and when you've got a large codebase then debugging such exceptions is what I meant by "adding complexity". But again this was only a speculation.
Regarding the other comment about shared mutable state, then of course it isn't necessarily required and I did write in the summary that "Java and the JVM provide enough tools to retrofit any concurrency model out there, but retrofitting anything won’t be the same as taking it into the initial design", which I do think still holds and I believe is one of the reasons why using libraries like Quasar won't be a trouble free experience, at least not until it's somewhat built into the JVM.
Though I won't even try to claim to know the ultimate truth and I'm always grateful to have someone correct me when I'm wrong. I appreciate your efforts in trying to make the JVM a better/more versatile platform with Quasar. I think that any such bold undertaking will only benefit the ecosystem in the long run.