JSR 277 and class loaders

Neil wondered what changes are likely to be made to java.lang.ClassLoader in support of JSR 277.

The Early Draft spec. lists some requirements for class loader behaviour in section 8.3.4. These boil down to class loaders being able to cope with more concurrency, especially in the presence of cyclic dependencies between JSR 277 modules.

Currently the deadlock exhibited by Sun's reference implementation has an experimental fix activated by a switch. There is some work in the pipeline to improve this situation for Java 7 which should also benefit OSGi at least when running on Sun's RI. Keep an eye on the Hotspot VM on OpenJDK if you are interested.