Regression in JDK8 build 78: javac complains about missing Class#isAnnotationPresent

[David M. Lloyd]

On 02/28/2013 07:25 PM, Joe Darcy wrote:
> As for the technical details of what is going on, the
> isAnnotationPresent method in the java.lang.reflect.AnnotatedElement
> interface has been turned into a default method:
>
>       http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=8007113
>
> This change was introduced in b77 and allows some sharing of code among
> the various classes implementing AnnotatedElement, including
> java.lang.Class, java.lang.reflect.{Method, Constructor}.
>
> For reasons I'll describe shortly, when compiling under a -source
> setting earlier than source 8, code that references isAnnotationPresent
> in the implementing classes (or the declaring interface) will not see
> the method as being present. Code that does not reference this method
> will continue to compile under "-source OLD -target OLD" (with the usual
> caveats) and code that references this method will see the method as
> expected under -source 8.

Is this something which only occurs at compile time, or will runtime 
code which does invokevirtual on Class#isAnnotationPresent() blow up 
with the same sort of exception?  If so then the method ought to be 
retained on this class, with an upcall to the default implementation.

Do we have any sort of document which covers runtime (binary) 
compatibility considerations for 8 in general, or the new lambda 
functionality in particular?

-- 
- DML