On 14/07/2016 10:03, Andrew Haley wrote:
On 14/07/16 09:59, Andrew Dinn wrote:
If this aspect of how Java currently works is to be removed then I
believe it needs to be done so on the basis of a publicly established
consensus, preferably under the aegis of the JSR EG. It certainly does
not seem right to me that such a goal should be adopted by an
implementation team without such consultation.
It goes much wider than Jigsaw: such a basic language change needs all
stakeholders to be consulted. Most of them surely won't be reading
the Jigsaw list, yet will still be affected.
This project (and JSR) is not proposing to remove setAccessible as that
would break many things. The comment that Andrew Dinn picked up started
with "In the very long term ..." and is a throw away comment on where
the platform needs to go long term. In general then we need to find
better solutions for things that setAccessible is used for today. That
could take years and many major releases. It's a bit like the Unsafe
issue in that regard.
Confusion aside, we have taken a first baby step towards degrading
setAccessible so that it can't be used to break into non-exported
packages. There was discussion about this on the EG mailing list last
year, much discussion on it here too.
Agents (Andrew Dinn's main interest I think) have the power to change
bytecode and extend modules at runtime to break encapsulation. I don't
think there is anything to be overly concerned here.
-Alan
