Some Scala based instrumentation tests fail on Java 11+ with Scala 2.13

We’re seeing failures with some of our Scala related instrumentation tests (e.g. com.nr.instrumentation.akka22.test.AkkaTest) that appear to be happening only on Java 11+, which I think are likely due to this bug with Scala 2.13: scala/bug#12340

We’re seeing the same failure:

java.lang.IllegalAccessError: Update to static final field akka.pattern.package$.MODULE$ attempted from a different method (<init>) than the initializer method <clinit> 

This can be repro’d locally against main by running the following if you remove the test annotations (e.g. Java11IncompatibleTest) that were added to prevent them from running on Java 11+:

./gradlew -Ptest11 :instrumentation:akka-2.2:test --tests "com.nr.instrumentation.akka22.test.AkkaTest" --stacktrace

The following PR was submitted to prevent those tests from running on Java 11+ but we should revisit this at some point in the future to see if we can get these instrumentation tests running on Java 11+ again. https://github.com/newrelic/newrelic-java-agent/pull/481

[vijaykramesh]

this has suddenly become a lot more urgent as everybody needs to upgrade their new relic java agent https://newrelic.com/blog/nerdlog/security-guidance-for-log4j

[helle]

Seeing the same error message after upgrading the newrelic java agent in an older akka application on java 11. Java Agent 7.2.0 works fine, 7.3.0 throws this error on startup

java.lang.IllegalAccessError: Update to static final field akka.pattern.package$.MODULE$ attempted from a different method (<init>) than the initializer method <clinit> 
	at akka.pattern.package$.<init>(package.scala:43)
	at akka.pattern.package$.<clinit>(package.scala)
	at akka.event.LoggingBus$class.akka$event$LoggingBus$$addLogger(Logging.scala:179)
	at akka.event.LoggingBus$$anonfun$4$$anonfun$apply$4.apply(Logging.scala:114)
	at akka.event.LoggingBus$$anonfun$4$$anonfun$apply$4.apply(Logging.scala:113)
	at scala.util.Success$$anonfun$map$1.apply(Try.scala:236)
...