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I understand that it's impossible to both implement a rule and not implement a rule, but what is actually the benefit of disabling this? All nerd sleeps safe at

by kpil 9y ago

I understand that it's impossible to both implement a rule and not implement a rule, but what is actually the benefit of disabling this? All nerd sleeps safe at night confident that no one changes their private variables? Does this mean that things like jmockit's deencapsulation stops working?

moomin 9y ago
I think the answer is that it allows them to optimise libraries.
didibus 9y ago
There is none, appart from making the Oracle employees life easier. They don't have to deal with the backlash of breaking customers by accident when touching private APIs, so it gives them more liberty. They decided to take the blow in one go, instead of spread over time. Now, the blow was bigger then they thought, so they've retracted and spread the change over Java 9 and 10, by making 9 an optional setting, and saying 10 will be the cutoff. In an ideal world, it makes sense. This is defensive programming, they're protecting themselves against unplanned usages of their libraries. That's always good when you're a maintainer. You know how annoying it is when you're trying to change and improve things and you realize you can't because someone was using your stuff in a completely dysfunctional way and now you'd break them if you proceeded. But in a practical world, the world of business especially. You should also know that part of the popularity of your software comes from all those use cases users have managed to somehow satisfy without you explicitly planning and building them. Take those away, and your software also loses a lot of value, until you reimplement all these use cases in a more sane way. Tjis will take time, and your customers might move on to something else. We'll see how this impacts Java.
- lomnakkus 9y ago
  I'm not going to try to convince you, but getting classpath isolation would be a huge deal for my use case. (We could theoretically do OSGi or similar, but that's quite a heavy-handed approach to what should be a simple -- even "default" -- thing).

by kpil 9y ago

moomin 9y ago

I think the answer is that it allows them to optimise libraries.

didibus 9y ago

There is none, appart from making the Oracle employees life easier. They don't have to deal with the backlash of breaking customers by accident when touching private APIs, so it gives them more liberty. They decided to take the blow in one go, instead of spread over time. Now, the blow was bigger then they thought, so they've retracted and spread the change over Java 9 and 10, by making 9 an optional setting, and saying 10 will be the cutoff. In an ideal world, it makes sense. This is defensive programming, they're protecting themselves against unplanned usages of their libraries. That's always good when you're a maintainer. You know how annoying it is when you're trying to change and improve things and you realize you can't because someone was using your stuff in a completely dysfunctional way and now you'd break them if you proceeded. But in a practical world, the world of business especially. You should also know that part of the popularity of your software comes from all those use cases users have managed to somehow satisfy without you explicitly planning and building them. Take those away, and your software also loses a lot of value, until you reimplement all these use cases in a more sane way. Tjis will take time, and your customers might move on to something else. We'll see how this impacts Java.

lomnakkus 9y ago
I'm not going to try to convince you, but getting classpath isolation would be a huge deal for my use case. (We could theoretically do OSGi or similar, but that's quite a heavy-handed approach to what should be a simple -- even "default" -- thing).