[bhakunikaran]

I wonder if a middle ground could be found, perhaps by introducing strict access controls or advanced warnings, instead of complete deprecation.

[vips7L]

Most of sun.misc.Unsafe forwards to jdk.internal, which will still exist and be accessible via --add-exports on the command line. This is a good middle ground for strong encapsulation and making sure users know that they're using internal api's that could change.