setAccessible() alternative with Jigsaw

Matej Novotny manovotn at redhat.com
Fri Mar 31 13:46:02 UTC 2017


Hello,

I work on Weld, context dependency injection framework.
Long story short - we need to generate proxies for classes - bytecode which we then "register" with the class loader using java.lang.ClassLoader#defineClass.

Obviously, for this you need reflections - to load java.lang.ClassLoader, then to load the method itself, and most importantly, to make the method accessible cause it's `protected`.
In JDK 9, this blows up as soon as you try to make the method accessible (invocation of setAccessible).

Fair enough, but what is the "legitimate" alternative?
I know I can --add-opens  / --add-opens / --permit-illegal-access
But all those just bypass the checks and don't really solve it. I am looking for an intended way to do such stuff.
I am pretty sure there are many frameworks which need to do this in one way or the other.

So far I have found workarounds which involve using `sun.misc.Unsafe` because there (for some reason) you are allowed to invoke setAccessible().
Is this the official intended backdoor? Because it sure does not look any safer/cleaner solution than the original one...

Any thoughts appreciated
Matej


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