RetentionPolicy CLASS vs. RUNTIME

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5971234/retentionpolicy-class-vs-runtime

RetentionPolicy CLASS vs. RUNTIME

up vote 6 down vote favorite 2	What is the practical difference between RetentionPolicy.CLASS and RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME? It looks like both are recorded into the bytecode and both may be accessed at the run-time anyway. java annotations share | improve this question edited May 11 '11 at 22:12 skaffman 150k 22 267 360 asked May 11 '11 at 22:12 Dima 176 1 1 11
	possible duplicate of Java Annotations - looking for an example of RetentionPolicy.CLASS –  skaffman May 11 '11 at 22:22   Also see stackoverflow.com/questions/3107970/… –  skaffman May 11 '11 at 22:22

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both may be accessed at the run-time anyway. That's not what the javadoc says: RUNTIME: Annotations are to be recorded in the class file by the compiler and retained by the VM at run time, so they may be read reflectively. CLASS: Annotations are to be recorded in the class file by the compiler but need not be retained by the VM at run time. In practice, I'm not aware of any use-cases for CLASS. It would only be useful if you wanted to read the bytecode programmatically, as opposed to via the classloader API, but that's a very specialised case, and I don't know why you wouldn't just use RUNTIME. Ironically, CLASS is the default behaviour. share | improve this answer answered May 11 '11 at 22:14 skaffman 150k 22 267 360

I read that of course. Sounds like "need not" does not exclude "may" That is why the question. –  Dima May 11 '11 at 22:17   @Dima: If the spec says an implementation doesn't have to do a thing, you'd be foolish to assume it does do that thing. Assume it doesn't. –  skaffman May 11 '11 at 22:18   You must be right. What is not clear is the meaning of words "implementation doesn't have to do a thing" for this rather specific case. At least as it is about RetentionPolicy.CLASS case I assume the implementation MUST keep information in the bytecode. Will anything stop me from extracting it from the bytecode using reflection? If yes (will stop) then what is the meaning of "keeping information in the bytecode"? –  Dima May 11 '11 at 22:23 3   @Dima: You can extract it from the bytecode if you read the bytecode directly. If you use the reflection API, it likely won't be there. –  skaffman May 11 '11 at 22:24   That may be right. Not sure if existence of RetentionPolicy.CLASS makes much sense in this case. Maybe something more was behind it initially ... –  Dima May 11 '11 at 23:05