On 09/10/2014 02:17, Thomas Stüfe wrote:
:
I would love to know why we do it this way. I am sure there is a valid
reason for it. Maybe Backward compatibility?
This was a very typical way for debugging utilities to work at the time.
It was never intended of course to be used to attach to non-HotSpot VMs
and also pre-dates a lot of the security protections and other features
that were subsequently introduced. One thing to know is there wasn't a
strict requirement to be able to attach to JDKs running previous
releases so if a new underlying mechanism is introduced then it
shouldn't be a major compatibility issue. Also as the attach API is
pluggable then it would be possible to have both old and new providers
for a time for cases where it was really necessary to attach to older
releases.
-Alan
