JDK 9 pre-review of JDK-6850612: Deprecate Class.newInstance since it violates the checked exception language contract

[Sean Mullan]

The changes to the security-libs portions look fine to me.

--Sean

On 04/21/2016 12:25 PM, joe darcy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After a generally positive reception, please review the webrev to
> implement the deprecation of Class.newInstance and the suppression of
> the resulting warnings:
>
>      http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/6850612.0/
>
> There are also some changes in the langtools repo; I'll send a separate
> review request for those changes to compiler-dev.
>
> I'll also forward this review request to other areas with affected code.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Joe
>
> On 4/17/2016 10:31 AM, joe darcy wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> With talk of deprecation in the air [1], I thought it would be a fine
>> time to examine one of the bugs on my list
>>
>>     JDK-6850612: Deprecate Class.newInstance since it violates the
>> checked exception language contract
>>
>> As the title of the bug implies, The Class.newInstance method
>> knowingly violates the checking exception contract. This has long been
>> documented in its specification:
>>
>>> Note that this method propagates any exception thrown by the nullary
>>> constructor, including a checked exception. Use of this method
>>> effectively bypasses the compile-time exception checking that would
>>> otherwise be performed by the compiler. The Constructor.newInstance
>>> method avoids this problem by wrapping any exception thrown by the
>>> constructor in a (checked) InvocationTargetException.
>>
>> Roughly, the fix would be to turn the text of this note into the
>> @deprecated text and to add a @Deprecated(since="9") annotation to the
>> method. There are a few dozen uses of the method in the JDK that would
>> have to be @SuppressWarning-ed or otherwise updated.
>>
>> Thoughts on the appropriateness of deprecating this method at this time?
>>
>> Comments on the bug have suggested that besides deprecating the
>> method, a new method on Class could be introduced,
>> newInstanceWithProperExceptionBehavior, that had the same signature
>> but wrapped exceptions thrown by the constructor call in the same way
>> Constructor.newInstance does.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -Joe
>>
>> [1]
>> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2016-April/040192.html
>>
>