Last week news broke that some developers are up in arms, claiming that Oracle's proposed removal of sun.misc.Unsafe in Java 9 will wreck the Java ecosystem. For many developers not embroiled in low-level programming, however, the private API is likely shrouded in mystery. What is this API so dangerous that its very name is unsafe?
Blogger and open source contributor Rafael Winterhalter explains in "Understanding sun.misc.Unsafe" that unsafe code is often
required for low-level programming, where developers modify platform functionality for a specific purpose. While JNI (Java Native Interface) is considered the safest option for low-level Java programming, many open source projects have used Unsafe as a less constrained workaround.