I’ve been a fan of the diagnostic command-line tool jcmd since hearing about jcmd at JavaOne 2012. I’ve used this tool extensively since then and have blogged multiple times about this tool:

• jcmd: One JDK Command-Line Tool to Rule Them All
• Determining the Active HotSpot Garbage Collector
• Programmatic jcmd Access
• JavaOne 2012: Diagnosing Your Application on the VM

After numerous years of developing with Java, it’s my opinion that the classloader is the source of some of the most difficult defects encountered during development and debugging. Given this observation and given my interest in jcmd, I am very interested in JDK-8203682 [“Add jcmd ‘VM.classloaders’ command to print out class loader hierarchy, details”].

The “Description” for JDK-8203682 states, “It would be helpful, as a complement to VM.classloader_stats, to have a command to print out the class loader hierarchy and class loader details.” In other words, this command to be added to jcmd would include display of classloaders in hierarchical fashion similar to that which classes are displayed by jcmd‘s VM.class_hierarchy command.

JDK-8203682 shows its “Status” as “Resolved” and its “Fix Version” as “11“. JDK-8203682 contains three text file attachments that depict the output of jcmd <pid> VM.classloaders: example-with-classes.txt, example-with-classes-verbose.txt, and example-with-reflection-and-noinflation.txt. Additional information is available in the announcement of the change set and in the change set itself.

When dealing with classloader-related issues in Java, any details can be helpful. The addition of the VM.classloaders command to jcmd will make this command-line tool even more valuable and insightful.