Nashorn's package name vs class name inferring logic is wrong

With jdk8 recent build on Mac, we get the NoClassDefFoundError from Class.forName instead of ClassNotFoundException as specified:

simple Java example:

class Main {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
     Class.forName("java.awt.event");
  }
}


The above code throws NoClassDefFoundError rather than ClassNotFoundException:

 Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java/awt/event (wrong name: java/awt/Event)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.findBootstrapClass(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.findBootstrapClassOrNull(ClassLoader.java:1005)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:412)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:410)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:308)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:356)
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:257)

This seems to be Mac specific. We have not been able to reproduce this one on Ubuntu for example.

nashorn checks if a qualified name is a (potential) java package or a class using Class.forName. If that throws ClassNotFoundException, nashorn treats the name as package prefix. If not, the qualified name is resolved to a java class. The current issue was found when a nashorn test that attempts java.awt.event.ActionListerner in script. "java.awt.event" prefix should have resolved as package name - but because nashorn gets NoClassDefFoundError which is not expected/caught, the test ends up throwing error.