java.lang.Thread.contextClassLoader : what if it were a weak reference ?

[Sylvain Laurent]

Hello all,

I'm tracking classloader leaks more or less as a hobby and found out  
that one of the (many) source of leaks come from threads that still  
have a reference to a classloader through their contextClassLoader  
instance variable.

So, I'm wondering : what if instead of "private ClassLoader  
contextClassLoader;" we had "private WeakReference<ClassLoader>  
contextClassLoaderRef" and the method getContextClassLoader would more  
or less returned contextClassLoaderRef.get() ?

Would it break many things ? is it incompatible with the specs ?

I'm very interested to read your opinion on this...

Sylvain