MethodHandleNatives::resolve are used by both MemberName$Factory::resolveOrFail and ::resolveOrNull, the latter allowing speculative lookup of methods.

While the linkResolver code in the VM will create and throw exceptions for all cases where a method or field is missing, these are caught by MethodHandles::resolve_MemberName and an empty handle is returned instead. However, the outer method, MHN_resolve_Mem will always create a new exception and throw it.

In case of resolveOrNull, we'll then ignore whatever exception is thrown in the java code, so in effect we're creating and ignoring two exceptions on a failed lookup.

We can cut this in half by passing a boolean to MethodHandleNatives::resolve to indicate whether we're doing a speculative lookup (resolveOrNull) or not (resolveOrFail).

This is related to JDK-8161588, which entertained the idea that we could make the expected cases of a speculative lookup not throw any exceptions at all.