Who firstly creates Class<?> object during class-loading process?

Question

In the documentation I found:

Class objects are constructed automatically by the Java Virtual Machine as classes are loaded and by calls to the defineClass method in the class loader.

I checked the source code, but didn't find the place defineClass to be called e.g. from loadClass method. Could you show me, please, who and when call defineClass method according to this scheme:

Picture source

Answer 1

The defineClass() method is called during the invocation of ClassLoader#loadClass(). However, this is not directly done within the java.lang.ClassLoader class but in one of its subclasses, e.g. in URLClassLoader#findClass().

The call to ClassLoader#defineClass() ends up in a call to one of the native methods defineClass1() or defineClass2(). The C implementations of these methods can be found in OpenJDK in src/share/native/java/lang/ClassLoader.c.