Should setAccessible be part of Java or not? (was Re: It's not too late for access control)

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2016/7/14 5:35:25 -0700, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> At Red Hat we have many Java programmers.  We also have many customers
> who are Java programmers.  I am trying to persuade people to try out
> JDK 9 in order to give us the feedback we need to ratify the JDK 9
> specification.  But you know where this is going: the changes to
> Jigsaw which we need are TBD, but with an assurance of "I think we'll
> be able to work something out."  This is a tough sell for me.

Is this any different than the usual chicken-and-egg problem of
live software development?  Much of Jigsaw is still in flux as we
work through issues in both the specification and the implementation.
If you have specific suggestions about how we could make it easier to
persuade people to try JDK 9 then I'd like to hear them.

Also, nobody is asking you, or anyone else, to take anything on faith.
We are -- and long have been -- asking for feedback, both practical
feedback based on running existing code against EA builds and design
feedback from developers of all skill levels.

> I am also rather concerned that too much is going into Jigsaw.  Along
> with much-needed modularization of the JDK itself we're getting access
> controls such as the one we're discussing.  I understand the argument
> for restricting setAccessible() in a module context (and the computer
> scientist in me says "Yay!") but it's not a necessary part of
> modularization and it should be discussed on its own merits.  Everyone
> is going to be affected by Jigsaw, but you can't expect everyone to
> read the minutiae of the discussion.

No, of course not, and that's exactly why we've been writing and talking
publicly, for years now, about this work.

- Mark