Proposal: Allow illegal reflective access by default in JDK 9

[Nicolai Parlog]

 Hi,

I don't want to pick on Andrew in particular but his paragraph is a
great summary of the sad state of this discussion:

> I don't think that's practical

Interesting, waiting for a real, practical, technical reason not to do that.

> many worried expressions

Err, what? So something is impractical because people are worried? I'm
sure they're worried because they think it's impractical.

> code that works on JDK 8 today will not work on JDK 9 tomorrow,
> yet no advance warning of this change was given in JDK 8

So twenty years of claiming internal APIs are internal and subject to
change[1] was not enough? Two years of this change being announced was
no enough? One more year of Java 8 is not enough? A simple flag to make
it work is not enough?

 so long ... Nicolai


[1]
http://web.archive.org/web/19980215011039/http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/faq/faq-sun-packages.html



On 19.05.2017 14:54, Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 19/05/17 11:11, Peter Levart wrote:
>> On 05/19/2017 01:17 AM, Nicolai Parlog wrote:
>>> With illegal access being permitted by default much fewer developers
>>> will be aware of the problem and much less pressure will be put on
>>> library and framework maintainers as well as on project management to
>>> invest into paying back this particular form of technical debt. So we
>>> get much less momentum to make the necessary changes in exchange for...
>>> not having to add a flag? That's ridiculous, an Armutszeugnis[2] for the
>>> Java community!
>>
>> +1
>>
>> I think that --illegal-access=permit-silently or equivalent is a 
>> reasonable request (in addition to other modes), but please make the 
>> --illegal-access=deny the default!
> 
> I don't think that's practical because, as Mark Reinhold put it, "the
> strong encapsulation of JDK-internal APIs has, in particular,
> triggered many worried expressions of concern that code that works on
> JDK 8 today will not work on JDK 9 tomorrow, yet no advance warning of
> this change was given in JDK 8."
> 
> Andrew.
> 

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