8009645: ClassFileTransformer hooks in ClassLoader no longer required (original) (raw)

Alan Bateman Alan.Bateman at oracle.com
Fri Mar 8 16:27:55 UTC 2013

I need a reviewer for a change to remove some crud from java.lang.ClassLoader. The crud in question is a hook to allow implementations of sun.misc.ClassFileTransformer be notified when defineClass fails with a class format error. It was originally added >10 years ago for Sun's Browser Plug-in to allow it fix up bad JDK1.1-era class files. I have confirmed that this is no longer needed.

As always with sun.misc classes it is useful to know if they are used outside of the JDK. To than end, I checked the data that Mandy collected on sun.* usage by artifacts in Maven Central. In the case of ClassFileTransformer, we only found one usage and that was in an old version of an artifact so it's no longer an issue. Given that java.lang.instrument has been available since JDK5 then there really isn't any excuse to be using this class anyway.

The webrev with the proposed changes is here. I've left sun.misc.ClassFileTransformer in place for now with a warning in the javadoc. It is a definitely a candidate to remove in the future.

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~alanb/8009645/webrev/

Thanks,

-Alan.

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