A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
The method sun.security.provider.certpath.Builder#getMatchingPolicies appears to have been intended as a lazy initialization of the matchingPolicies field of the Builder class. However it checks for "matchingPolicies != null" (presumably it should be "matchingPolicies == null") at the start, which is always false. Therefore the method always returns null and the intended optimization goes unused.

Note that I have observed the issue in the latest JDK code available to me and also at least as far back as jdk11u-dev.

STEPS TO FOLLOW TO REPRODUCE THE PROBLEM :
This bug was found by code review and can easily be verified from source code alone.