On 4/17/16 10:31 AM, joe darcy wrote:
With talk of deprecation in the air [1], I thought it would be a fine time to
"In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of deprecation."
-- apologies to Tennyson
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: [...]
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.
Deprecating Class.newInstance() seems reasonable to me, for the reasons you've
stated.
It's not clear to me that a replacement method adds much value. I believe it's
possible to replace a call
clazz.newInstance() // 1
with the call
clazz.getConstructor().newInstance() // 2
which is only a bit longer. Both snippets are declared to throw
InstantiationException and IllegalAccessException. But snippet 2 also is
declared to throw InvocationTargetException and NoSuchMethodException.
This would seem to be an inconvenience, but *all* of these exceptions are
subtypes of ReflectiveOperationException. It seems pretty likely to me that most
code handles these different exception types the same way. So it's fairly low
cost to replace snippet 1 with snippet 2, and to adjust the exception handling
to deal with ReflectiveOperationException. Thus I don't see much value in adding
a new method such as Class.newInstanceWithProperExceptionBehavior().
s'marks
