Use ByteBuddy to instrument classes instead Javassist

[thekingnothing]

The main issue with Javassist it's that it read classes from disk before instrumenting. Such behaviour breaks compatibility with other tools which are instrumenting classes (see discussion jacoco/jacoco#51)

ByteBuddy could help us to resolve the issue and supporting online Jacoco Instrumenting.

ByteBudy agent has to be used for implementation of powermock-agent

[fabriziomieli]

Hi, When this is supposed to be ready?

[thekingnothing]

Hi, I hope I will finish by the end of June. I've created an issue for ByteBuddy project to clarify what is possible to do with using ByteBuddy (raphw/byte-buddy#296). Best regrads, Arthur Zagretdinov On 26 Apr 2017, at 10:49, fabriziomieli <notifications@github.com<mailto:notifications@github.com>> wrote: Hi, When this is supposed to be ready? — You are receiving this because you were assigned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#727 (comment)>, or mute the thread<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AMkKAFdZCxJDidiRZ435ivYLJgm0Tsbyks5rzwUkgaJpZM4LBFW1>.

[fabriziomieli]

Thank you very much

[peter-janssen]

Will you release this feature when it is ready or only as part of PowerMock 2.0?

[thekingnothing]

I'm going to release it as part of PowerMock 2.0, because the change for ButyBuddy is close intertwined with clearing PowerMock from copy-pasted mockito code.

[peter-janssen]

The 2.0 release looks quite big so I guess the earlier estimate of end of june (you did mean 2017, right?) will be pushed back quite a bit?

[softcoder]

Is there a build we can test these fixes? Please provide a link that would be awesome!

[thekingnothing]

@softcoder the feature is still being developed and it's unready for testing. As soon as it will be ready I will merge changes to the release/2.x branch and drop a beta version release.

[softcoder]

Will we be able to test this soon?

[thekingnothing]

@softcoder I'm afraid that not earlier than in 2 months. I've got stuck with suppressing constructors and mocking new call. Previously, Javassit cared about the correct calculation of the stack frame. Now, I have to do it by myself.

[IslamSalah]

Has the release plan been updated?

[benken-parasoft]

Is there an ETA for a 2.0.0 release? If there are more unforeseen delays, perhaps a newer beta can be published to maven central? The last beta that was published (beta.5) is almost a year old.

[thekingnothing]

Update: the current situation is the following: I prepared RC with ByteBuddy and dropped it, however later I found out that all tests were running only against Javassist implementation. After I fixed build script I saw that my implementation for a constructor and new call mocking worked only in basic cases.

I am trying to implement a general solution which will work in most cases. The main issue I have now - ByteBuddy does not provide any API to insert conditions in bytecode. As a result, I have to implement everything by myself: calculating stack, local variable and so on.

@benken-parasoft, the last beta was released last May.
https://bintray.com/powermock/generic/powermock-development/powermock-2.0.0-beta.11
However, this beta has full Mockito 2.0 support and even have ByteBuddy implementation which does not work correctly except very basic cases.

I don't have any ETA for 2.0.0 release for now, as the issue I have now it's a pretty hard and working less than 4-5 hours per I moving very slow.

[benken-parasoft]

Thanks for the update. For background, enterprise users like myself are moving ahead with newer java releases which now release every six months. For existing unit test bases that use powermock, we have to either switch to 2.x or hold our entire unit test bases to older java versions.

the last beta was released last May

Thanks for the clarification. I only found the source tag but not any released binaries. Up until now, I've always pulled powermock releases from maven central, including the latest 1.7.4 release from April. Are you no longer releasing binaries to maven central for 2.x? Was this intentional or an oversight? Or should users stop using maven central and use the maven repository from bintray instead?

[thekingnothing]

@benken-parasoft,

I only found the source tag but not any released binaries. Up until now, I've always pulled powermock releases from maven central, including the latest 1.7.4 release from April. Are you no longer releasing binaries to maven central for 2.x? Was this intentional or an oversight?

It was done intentionally as I don't want to span Maven Central with a lot of beta version. PowerMocks migrated to continue delivery, so it means that each pull request merged to release branches is being published to a repository as an artifact. However, I understood that could development PowerMock 2.0 could take a lot time (not so many as it already has taken), I decided to split beta release to Bintray and GA release to maven central.

[thekingnothing]

I'm excluding this feature from PowerMock 2.0.0 as working on it took to many time and I'm not able to finish it in near future. I will release PowerMock 2.0.0 with all changes and full supporting Mockito 2.x and then will continue work on this feature as a part of PowerMock 3.x where I will drop supporting Java less than 1.8

[Tibor17]

@thekingnothing
I respect your decision.
I think here your work is to use very low level bytecode instructions. I saw similar work in JaCoCo project. So. If you involved committers from JaCoCo, their experiences would be beneficial and you would have more spare time for yourself.

[benken-parasoft]

@thekingnothing, I notice ByteBuddy changes backed out as part of PR 948. Then I saw PR 910 mentioned in the release notes 2.0.0 RC1 but I assume this is just referring to what you had backed out. However, I still might not be understanding these changes correctly. Can you clarify what is or isn't being included with respect to ByteBuddy for the 2.0.0 release?

I am primarily concerned about java version support. My organization needs to be able to support new Java releases as they come out, which is now every six months. Based on my observations, this appears to depend on which version of what byte code library being used, ByteBuddy vs Javassist. For example, I seemed to be able to do static mocking in Java 11 with PowerMock 2.0.0 beta 11 with Mockito 2.23 and ByteBuddy 1.9. So, if PowerMock 2.0.0 switches back to using Javassist then will static mocking no long work in java > 8 again? To support new java, such as java 11, will I be able to switch to the 2.0.0 release or should I should stay on beta 11 or use later a 3.0 snapshot with preliminary ByteBuddy support re-introduced?

[benken-parasoft]

I am primarily concerned about java version support.

With PowerMock 22 using Javassist again, it looks like PowerMock would only work with Java 9 but not 10 or 11. At least, the pom.xml for PowerMock 2.0.0-RC.2 shows a dependency on Javassist 3.22.0-GA which looks to support Java 9. Perhaps it be possible to use PowerMock with Javassist 3.24.0-GA for Java 11 support instead? Previously, with PowerMock 2.0.0 beta 11, I was able to use ByteBuddy 1.9 for Java 11 support.