requesting review on JDK-8348828: Windows dll loading now resolves symlinks

[Benjamin Peterson]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 12:52 PM Alan Bateman <alan.bateman at oracle.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/10/2025 18:08, Benjamin Peterson wrote:
>
> The reproducer I submitted in the initial bug report is definitely
> weird looking because I attempted point out the breaking change in as
> simple and as self-contained a manner as possible. But, I did run into
> this in a very real and useful application. I've tried to add more
> context about the application in comments such as
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8348828?focusedId=14744766&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-14744766 .
> I can certainly answer more questions about the usecase if the would
> be helpful.
>
> The heart of the matter is: Is it legal to call System.loadLibrary()
> with a symlink on Windows? The JDK before 24's answer was yes.
>
> I have sympathy for the more general case. I think it would be useful to create a small table of what works and doesn't work, e.g.
>
> foo.dll  ->  dir\bar.dll

This works all on Java versions.

> foo.dll  ->  dir\bar

This doesn't work after Java 24.

> foo       ->  dir\bar.dll

This didn't work before Java 24 but works now I believe.