Campbell Ritchie wrote:I couldn’t find anything about serialisation in the Java Language Specification, nor did I see anything about initialisers in the serialisation specification.
It's under
3.1 The ObjectInputStream class, in
item 11:
11. An instance of the class is allocated. The instance and its handle are added to the set of known objects. The contents restored appropriately:
a. For serializable objects, the no-arg constructor for the first non-serializable supertype is run. For serializable classes, the fields are initialized to the default value appropriate for its type. Then the fields of each class are restored by calling class-specific readObject methods, or if these are not defined, by calling the defaultReadObject method. Note that field initializers and constructors are not executed for serializable classes during deserialization. In the normal case, the version of the class that wrote the stream will be the same as the class reading the stream. In this case, all of the supertypes of the object in the stream will match the supertypes in the currently-loaded class. If the version of the class that wrote the stream had different supertypes than the loaded class, the ObjectInputStream must be more careful about restoring or initializing the state of the differing classes. It must step through the classes, matching the available data in the stream with the classes of the object being restored. Data for classes that occur in the stream, but do not occur in the object, is discarded. For classes that occur in the object, but not in the stream, the class fields are set to default values by default serialization.
(Emphasis added by me.)