[hibernate-dev] BlobProxy, Reducing the amount of Proxies we rely on at runtime

I'm trying to understand if we could remove some of the usages of `java.lang.reflect.Proxy`. Clearly it's a long journey and maybe we will never be able to remove them all, but I would at least want to try avoiding most of their neet at runtime - limiting their usage at bootstrap/configuration or other similar "one time" contexts. We're all aware that these proxies have not been introduced lightly: most are necessary or very useful; at least useful enough to prefer having them to not having them; surely the tradeoffs have been considered. So what I'm trying to understand now is if all the tradeoffs made in the past are still actual; some of the related code is > 10 years old; I could use some help with evaluating what could be safely removed. One example: org.hibernate.engine.jdbc.BlobProxy has the following comment: "We use proxies here solely to avoid JDBC version incompatibilities." Today we require Java8 as baseline, and the `java.sql.Blob` did not change in any more recent JDK (I just thouroughly diff-ed the JDK8,9,10,11,12 on this package using Gunnar's jdk-api-diff tool). Would that be a reasonable candidate to replace the Proxy usage with a plain implementation of the relevant interfaces? Clearly this implies I'm betting that future JDKs will not break this again, still I'd rather cleanup this usage today. 1 - Could I go ahead with that? 2 - Any more such cleanups come to mind? Thanks, Sanne