What is the reason behind Enum.hashCode()?

The only reason for using Object's hashCode() and for making it final I can imagine, is to make me ask this question.

First of all, you should not rely on such mechanisms for sharing objects between JVMs. That's simply not a supported use case. When you serialize / deserialize you should rely on your own comparison mechanisms or only "compare" the results against objects within your own JVM.

The reason for letting enums hashCode be implemented as Objects hash code (based on identity) is because, within one JVM there will only be one instance of each enum object. This is enough to ensure that such implementation makes sense and is correct.

You could argue like "Hey, String and the wrappers for the primitives (Long, Integer, ...) all have well defined, deterministic, specifications of hashCode! Why doesn't the enums have it?", Well, to begin with, you can have several distinct string references representing the same string which means that using super.hashCode would be an error, so these classes necessarily need their own hashCode implementations. For these core classes it made sense to let them have well-defined deterministic hashCodes.

Why did they choose to solve it like this?

Well, look at the requirements of the hashCode implementation. The main concern is to make sure that each object should return a distinct hash code (unless it is equal to another object). The identity-based approach is super efficient and guarantees this, while your suggestion does not. This requirement is apparently stronger than any "convenience bonus" about easing up on serialization etc.

I think that the reason they made it final is to avoid developers shooting themselves in the foot by rewriting a suboptimal (or even incorrect) hashCode.

Regarding the chosen implementation: it's not stable across JVMs, but it's very fast, avoid collisions, and doesn't need an additional field in the enum. Given the normally small number of instances of an enum class, and the speed of the equals method, I wouldn't be surprised if the HashMap lookup time was bigger with your algorithm than with the current one, due to its additional complexity.

I've asked the same question, because did not saw this one. Why in Enum hashCode() refers to the Object hashCode() implementaion, instead of ordinal() function?

I encountered it as a sort of a problem, when defining my own hash function, for an Object relying on enum hashCode as one of the composites. When checking a value in a Set of Objects, returned by the function, I checked them in an order, which I would expect it to be the same, since the hashCode I define myself, and so I expect elements to fall at the same nodes on the tree, but since hashCode returned by enum changes from start to start, this assumption was wrong, and test could fail once in a while.

So, when I figured out the problem, I started using ordinal instead. I am not sure everyone writing hashCode for their Object realize this.

So basically, you can't define your own deterministic hashCode, while relying on enum hashCode, and you need to use ordinal instead

P.S. This was too big for a comment :)