Question ad #AwkwardStrongEncapsulation (Re: Moving the changes in jake to jdk9/dev

[David Holmes]

On 14/12/2016 8:15 PM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 14/12/2016 09:56, David Holmes wrote:
>
>>
>> Sorry I don't follow. Calling setAccessible(true), logically does
>> nothing except set a flag that controls whether reflective use of the
>> member will need to pass an access check -it doesn't (or shouldn't)
>> perform the access check!
> Best to read the javadoc as this changed to align with modules. When
> reading the javadoc then keep in mind that the JDK modules do not open
> their packages for deep reflection.

Yes - thanks Alan. I've only just noticed that setAccessible has been 
updated to check the accessibility and throw an exception! That came as 
a surprise. It doesn't have all the info needed to make the decision in 
all cases.

David
-----

>> The actual use then has the full access check. Due to the added
>> complication of module encapsulation we can't simply skip the access
>> check if setAccessible is true, because we also need to see if the
>> target module is "open" in the right way.
> If setAccessible(true) succeeds then it means access checks are
> suppressed when using that AccessibleObject is used. There are no
> changes here. Having setAccessible(true) succeed but still do an access
> check when using the AccessibleObject would be too significant a change
> in behavior.
>
>
>>
>> If the current implementation is trying to cache the result of the
>> accessibility check at setAccessible time then that would seem an
>> invalid attempt at optimisation. java.lang.reflect objects are not,
>> AFAIK, intended to be capabilities the way MethodHandles are.
> I don't see an issue here as it is not used when the accessible flag has
> been set with setAccessible(true).
>
>>
>> BTW in this discussion when setAccessible says that it is "suppressing
>> default Java language access control checks" are the module related
>> checks considered "language access control checks" or are they
>> considered something outside the language?
> The former.
>
> -Alan