Review Request JDK-8210721: Replace legacy serial exception field with Throwable::cause

[Daniel Fuchs]

Hi Mandy,

Looks good to me as well.

If a JDK 12 exception is deserialized by an earlier version of
the JDK, then the deserialized exception will have both its
cause field and custom exception field set to the cause
(instead of having the cause field null and the custom field
carrying the cause), but I believe that's benign.

Nit: PrivilegedActionException.java

   75      *Memory

is missing a space after the *.

Obviously no need for another webrev, and no need for a new
fix if you pushed already...

best regards,

-- daniel


On 13/09/2018 19:44, mandy chung wrote:
> A few exception classes such as ExceptionInInitializerError, 
> InvocationTargetException,
> etc were defined prior to the exception chaining facility and provides 
> the API to get
> the cause of the exception. These classes keep its legacy serial field e.g.
> ExceptionInInitializerError::exception to get the serialization to work 
> on older JDK version.
> 
> During the review of JDK-8209553 [1], Peter and Joe suggest to remove 
> this legacy
> serial field and implement the serialization using 
> serialPersistentFields, readObject
> and writeObject.   It turns out that these redundant fields were removed 
> when the
> exception chaining support was initially implemented but it got reverted 
> to fix
> JDK-4385429 since Throwable::setCause rejects any further change as
> Throwable::cause has been initialized to null.
> 
> This patch removes these legacy serial field and stores the cause in 
> Throwable::cause.
> It's essentially a redo for the fix for JDK-4385429.
> 
> webrev:
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mchung/jdk12/webrevs/8210721/webrev.00/
> 
> Mandy
> [1] 
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2018-August/054878.html 
>