Hello,
With talk of deprecation in the air [1], I thought it would be a fine
time to examine one of the bugs on my list
JDK-6850612: Deprecate Class.newInstance since it violates the
checked exception language contract
As the title of the bug implies, The Class.newInstance method knowingly
violates the checking exception contract. This has long been documented
in its specification:
Note that this method propagates any exception thrown by the nullary
constructor, including a checked exception. Use of this method
effectively bypasses the compile-time exception checking that would
otherwise be performed by the compiler. The Constructor.newInstance
method avoids this problem by wrapping any exception thrown by the
constructor in a (checked) InvocationTargetException.
Roughly, the fix would be to turn the text of this note into the
@deprecated text and to add a @Deprecated(since="9") annotation to the
method. There are a few dozen uses of the method in the JDK that would
have to be @SuppressWarning-ed or otherwise updated.
Thoughts on the appropriateness of deprecating this method at this time?
Comments on the bug have suggested that besides deprecating the method,
a new method on Class could be introduced,
newInstanceWithProperExceptionBehavior, that had the same signature but
wrapped exceptions thrown by the constructor call in the same way
Constructor.newInstance does.
Thanks,
-Joe
[1]
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2016-April/040192.html
