methodhandle

I am studying new features of JDK 1.7 and I just can't get it what MethodHandle is designed for? I understand (direct) invocation of the static method (and use of Core Reflection API that is straightforward in this case). I understand also (direct) invocation of the virtual method (non-static, non-final) (and use of Core Reflection API that requires going through Class's hierarchy obj.getClass().getSuperclass() ). Invocation of non-virtual method can be treated as special case of the former one. Yes, I aware that there is an issue with overloading. If you want to invoke method you have to

Is it possible to convert a method reference (e.g. SomeClass::someMethod ) to a MethodHandle instance? I want the benefits of compile-time checking (ensuring that the class and method exists) as well as the ability to introspect the method using the MethodHandle API. Use-case: I've got code that needs to execute if and only if the request was not triggered by a specific method (to avoid endless recursion). I want a compile-time check to ensure the class/method exists but a runtime check to compare the caller to the method. So to recap: Is it possible to convert a method reference to a

I'm writing some code that calls Field.set and Field.get many many thousands of times. Obviously this is very slow because of the reflection . I want to see if I can improve performance using MethodHandle in Java 7. So far here's what I have: Instead of field.set(pojo, value) , I'm doing: private static final Map<Field, MethodHandle> setHandles = new HashMap<>(); MethodHandle mh = setHandles.get(field); if (mh == null) { mh = lookup.unreflectSetter(field); setHandles.put(field, mh); } mh.invoke(pojo, value); However, this doesn't seem to perform better than the Field.set call using reflection.