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Deprecate the Memory-Access Methods in sun.misc.Unsafe for Removal in a Future Release

The effort focused on enforcing the integrity of the Java platform continues! The next phase in that long but important initiative will most likely target the sun.misc.Unsafe API used for accessing memory. Those methods alone represent 79 methods out of the 87 sun.misc.Unsafe methods!

This draft JEP outlines the plan to deprecate for removal the sun.misc.Unsafe Memory-Access methods, the reasons, and the standard alternatives. As the draft plan suggests, the first step will be to deprecate all memory-access methods (on-heap, off-heap, and bimodal) for removal. This will cause compile-time deprecation warnings for code that refers to the methods, alerting library developers to their forthcoming removal. In addition, a new command-line option will allow users to receive runtime warnings when those methods are used. This command-line will help users to assess if their codebase uses those unsafe API to access memory. It should be mentioned that other tools such as JFR and jdeprscan can also be used to detect the use of those deprecated APIs.

Call To Action

Starting with JDK 22, the permanent Foreign Function & Memory API offers a standard and secure way to access off-heap API. So, library developers are strongly encouraged to migrate from sun.misc.Unsafe to the supported replacements, so that applications can migrate smoothly to modern JDKs. The initial step will be to conduct investigations to understand if, how, and where sun.misc.Unsafe methods are used to access memory.

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