Why Forbid Object Cloning

These are the reasons why I chose to forbid object cloning:

• cloning is a risky extralinguistic object creation mechanism;
• cloning demands adherence to thinly documented conventions;
• cloning conflicts with the proper use of final fields;
• cloning throws unnecessary checked exceptions;
• cloning requires casts.

How cloning conflicts with final fields

Say Foo has a final Bar field. Bar is mutable but the field is final. When cloning Foo, you would need to fix the field by doing:

// ...
Foo clone = (Foo) super.clone();
clone.bar = (Bar) bar.clone(); // Impossible !
return clone;
// ...

which is impossible.