<div dir="ltr"><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">When defining a class in the JDK, one may either use a byte array or a byte buffer to hold the contents of the class. The latter is useful when (for example) a JAR file containing uncompressed classes is mapped into memory. Thus, some class loaders depend on this form of the API for class definition.</div></div><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">If I were to supplement such a class loader with a class transformation step based on the class file API, I would have to copy the bytes of each class on to the heap as a byte[] before I could begin parsing it. This is potentially expensive, and definitely awkward.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">After transformation, it doesn't really matter if you have a byte[] or ByteBuffer because either way, the class can be defined directly.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">It would be nice if the class file parser could accept either a byte[] or a ByteBuffer. I did a quick bit of exploratory work and it looks like porting the code to read from a ByteBuffer instead of a byte[] (using ByteBuffer.wrap() for the array case) would be largely straightforward *except* for the code which parses UTF-8 constants into strings. Also there could be some small performance differences (maybe positive, maybe negative) depending on how the buffer is accessed.</div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Is this something that might be considered?</div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">- DML • he/him<br></div></div></div>