[External] : Re: Disallowing the dynamic loading of agents by default

[Ron Pressler]

> On 25 Mar 2023, at 19:56, Gregg G Wonderly <greggwon at cox.net> wrote:
> 
> I understand you may have personal experiences with how you use Java.  In my experience and others, Java has constantly had fundamental breakage in various details due to lack of understanding, on the platform development team(s) of what people actually do with Java.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone


Since at this point it is an established fact that the vast majority of JDK upgrade difficulties (certainly weighed by cost) have been the result of lack of integrity guarantees made by strong encapsulation, those who care about stability should welcome this change and the others to follow that will close the remaining loopholes in strong encapsulation.

Strong encapsulation has already proven itself over the past several releases in allowing us to make big internal changes to the platform (such as those required for virtual threads) with little adverse effect on compatibility, something that wasn’t possible before. The success of strong encapsulation in that area shows that it’s the right approach for letting Java evolve, even in very significant ways, and at the same time reduce upgrade costs.

— Ron