Questions about com.sun.tools.attach implementation on windows

[Alan Bateman]

On 09/10/2014 02:17, Thomas Stüfe wrote:
>
> :
>
> I would love to know why we do it this way. I am sure there is a valid 
> reason for it. Maybe Backward compatibility?
>
This was a very typical way for debugging utilities to work at the time. 
It was never intended of course to be used to attach to non-HotSpot VMs 
and also pre-dates a lot of the security protections and other features 
that were subsequently introduced. One thing to know is there wasn't a 
strict requirement to be able to attach to JDKs running previous 
releases so if a new underlying mechanism is introduced then it 
shouldn't be a major compatibility issue. Also as the attach API is 
pluggable then it would be possible to have both old and new providers 
for a time for cases where it was really necessary to attach to older 
releases.

-Alan