Reflection and method handles serve different purposes, and exist at different levels of abstraction. You should use the one that is right for the problem you are solving. Reflection is a general-purpose introspection mechanism, which includes many features that the method handle mechanism lacks, such as enumerating the members of a class (Class.getMethods()), inspecting the … Read more
2015-06-01: Updated to reflect @JoeC’s comment about another case when handles are static. Also updated to latest JMH and re-ran on modern hardware. The conclusion stays almost the same. Please do proper benchmarking, it is arguably not that hard with JMH. Once you do that, the answer becomes obvious. It can also showcase the proper … Read more
What you can do with MethodHandles is curry methods, change the types of parameters and change their order. Method Handles can handle both methods and fields. Another trick which MethodHandles do is use primitive direct (rather than via wrappers) MethodHandles can be faster than using reflection as there is more direct support in the JVM … Read more