RFR: 8348828: Windows dll loading now resolves symlinks [v8]

[Benjamin Peterson]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2025 02:44:42 GMT, David Holmes <dholmes at openjdk.org> wrote:

> > So, this dot logic should be lifted to JVM_LoadLibrary?
> 
> Possibly, but I still want to understand this change as it is now proposed. The whole thing has been about symlinks till now, so now what exactly is the problem and solution?

It's been a windy path. As the PR description says, the problem appeared after JDK-8003887, which was a symlink-related change. JDK-8003887 looks be correct, though, and the regression was due to it exposing underlying problems in the native library loading code. Specifically, `JVM_LoadLibrary` on Windows does not work as expected when given a file without a `.dll` extension. We can make `JVM_LoadLibrary` work with the dot appending trick (current version of the PR), or apply the dot-appending trick in `NativeLibraries` (previous version of the PR).

> You just want a way to load an arbitrarily-named file as if it were a dll?

That sounds generally desirable. My use case is narrower. The file presented to `System.loadLibrary` does end with `.dll`. But after the path canonicalization done by `NativeLibraries`, the final path does not end with `.dll`.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/24694#issuecomment-3379394592