While trying to replicate JDK-8179439, I noticed that the error message simply becomes "error at or after byte 0" when the ClassFile API cannot iterate the instructions due to malformed structures, such as bad low value in a tableswitch instruction, while a bad bci offset (no structural corruption) has a better error message.

CodeWriter.writeInstrs should not swallow the IAE caught, but should report the IAE's message to be more informative to users in such cases.