Eager vs Lazy resolution of classes

Tue Jul 20 20:50:00 GMT 2004

The following test case creates a class on the fly in the classpath and 
then tries to call into that class statically, as opposed to via 
Class.forName() or some other classloader based mechanism.
On Sun's 1.5 beta JVM, I get:
$ rm Bar.class
$ java Resolve
start
99
hello!!
The Java Specification makes it clear that resolution of class 
dependencies is "eager". That is, all references from a given class can 
be resolved at link time, provided that any errors from resolution are 
deferred until active use. However, it also states that implementations 
MAY choose to resolve dependencies more lazily if they wish. This seems 
to be what Sun's implementation does. This is a concern because the 
BC-ABI in its current form is designed for eager resolution. While 
spec-compliant, there may be code out there which depends on Sun-like 
behaviour.
Interestingly, gij fails this test too, and in fact is not compliant 
with the spec at all because it is throwing NoClassDefFoundError before 
the first active use of the missing class:
$ rm Foo.class
$ gij Resolve
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: while 
resolving class: Resolve
 at java.lang.VMClassLoader.resolveClass(java.lang.Class) 
(/local/gcc-clean/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
 at java.lang.Class.initializeClass() 
(/local/gcc-clean/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
 at java.lang.Class.forName(java.lang.String, boolean, 
java.lang.ClassLoader) (/local/gcc-clean/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
....etc
I think its quite possible to make the BC-ABI compatible with Suns 
behaviour, but its a little complicated. We'll have to remember which 
(if any) otable/atable entries that remain unresolved after linking, 
associate them with their class, and then go back and fill in those 
entries during linking/initialization of that class (at first active use).
Since it will likely be quite a bit of extra work to implement this, it 
would be good to get an understanding of how important this feature is. 
ie: is it something that we should be concentrating on for 3.5, or can 
it be deferred for later? Does anyone know of popular applications that 
rely on being able to do this? My understanding is that Eclipse 3 now 
runs on gij, so presumably it does not fall into this category?
Regards
Bryce
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