LambdaMetafactory to access class on a different ClassLoader

Question

I have this code which works fine:

Method getterMethod = Person.class.getDeclaredMethod(\"getName\");

MethodHandles.Lookup lookup = MethodHandles.publicLook         


        

Answer 1

LambdaMetafactory's methods require you to pass PRIVATE lookup as their first parameter. Specification caller - Represents a lookup context with the accessibility privileges of the caller. might be a bit obscure, but it supposed to give the idea about the required privileges of the Lookup.

Why does it have to be private? That's sort of future proofing the API. Remember that LambdaMetafactory is supposed to be invoked via invokedynamic instructions generated by compiler for lambdas. In that case VM will always pass the caller's MethodHandles.lookup() to the method, so the Lookup will always be PRIVATE. Using LambdaMetafactory directly in Java code is perfectly fine if you need it for your use case, but it isn't the primary usage, so the API is restricted to give just enough for the invokedynamic case but nothing more (other words - if invokedynamic works with PRIVATE then let's prohibit everything else just in case).

Answer 2

As said by this answer, the lookup modes must include the private access to be accepted by the LambdaMetaFactory. Basically, this implies that either, the caller is the specified class, as it created the particular lookup instance, or the lookup class has enough trust to pass the lookup object to the code which did the actual call (which is e.g. implied when using invokedynamic pointing to a particular bootstrap method).

Starting with Java 9, there is the method privateLookupIn(Class, MethodHandles.Lookup) to attempt to get a lookup object with private access to another class. As the documentation specifies, the access is checked against the module access rules, i.e. the caller must be “allowed to do deep reflection on the target class”. So the presence of the trust mentioned above, still is required, now in terms of module accessibility. I suppose, that’s the way to go for frameworks, where the code managed by the framework will be opened to the framework to support such access.

If that’s not feasible, this answer contains an alternative, in case you are the creator of the class loader. It uses the class loader’s API to inject a new class which creates the lookup object and allows the creator to access it. There are variations imaginable, including making it secure by letting the synthetic class call back into the creator’s code to hand over the lookup object, instead of storing it in a field where everyone could read it.