Class Loaders

Third-Party Software and Licenses lists all bundled libraries and their versions for each product.

Gradle 7 introduced implementation scope, replacing compile scope. For this setup, to use project defined dependency instead of the bundled IDE version, add the following snippet to your Gradle build script:

configurations.all {
  resolutionStrategy.sortArtifacts(ResolutionStrategy.SortOrder.DEPENDENCY_FIRST)
}

configurations.all {
  resolutionStrategy.sortArtifacts(ResolutionStrategy.SortOrder.DEPENDENCY_FIRST)
}

By default, the main IDE class loader loads classes that are not found in the plugin class loader. However, in the plugin.xml file, you may use the <depends> element to specify that a plugin depends on one or more other plugins. In this case, the class loaders of those plugins will be used for classes not found in the current plugin. This allows a plugin to reference classes from other plugins.

Some libraries use ServiceLoader to detect and load implementations. For this to work in a plugin, the context class loader must be set to the plugin's classloader and restored afterwards with the original one around initialization code:

Thread currentThread = Thread.currentThread();
ClassLoader originalClassLoader = currentThread.getContextClassLoader();
ClassLoader pluginClassLoader = this.getClass().getClassLoader();
try {
  currentThread.setContextClassLoader(pluginClassLoader);
  // code working with ServiceLoader here
} finally {
  currentThread.setContextClassLoader(originalClassLoader);
}