What are GeneratedMethodAccessor1,2,etc and why might they not be found?

Question

I'm getting stack traces like this:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun/reflect/GeneratedMethodAccessor1
    at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor1.<clinit>(Unknown Source)
    at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
    at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
    at java.lang.Class.newInstance0(Class.java:355)
    at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:308)
    at sun.reflect.MethodAccessorGenerator$1.run(MethodAccessorGenerator.java:381)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.MethodAccessorGenerator.generate(MethodAccessorGenerator.java:377)
    at sun.reflect.MethodAccessorGenerator.generateMethod(MethodAccessorGenerator.java:59)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:28)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
    at edu.tufts.cs.testsim.LogicalProcess.dispatchMessage(LogicalProcess.java:214)
    at edu.tufts.cs.testsim.LogicalProcess.processForward(LogicalProcess.java:287)
    at edu.tufts.cs.testsim.LogicalProcess.doOperation(LogicalProcess.java:423)
    at edu.tufts.cs.testsim.LogicalProcess.run(LogicalProcess.java:434)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:637)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor1
    at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:316)
    at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:288)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:374)
    ... 19 more

What are GeneratedMethodAccessor1, GeneratedMethodAccessor2, GeneratedMethodAccessorN and what might be causing them to not be found? I am doing some byte code rewriting at run time, but only before the class is loaded, and the first several calls through reflection work fine. I'm wondering if this is happening after the JIT compiler gets a hold of my code, but I don't even have a very good idea of how to start debugging this.

Answer 1

GeneratedMethodAccessor### are classes generated at runtime by the reflection implementation to call methods and constructors. This form a bytecode bridge from instances of Method or Constructor to the actual method or constructor. More information is available in the source code.

Deserialisation also does something similar, sharing some of the same mechanism, to invoke the most derived non-Serializable constructor.