I'm not entirely sure how I got to this situation but somehow I'm getting a null ClassLoader from Thread.getContextClassLoader. After reading a little (not much info in the docs nor on google) I got the impression that it's valid for the current thread to have a null class loader, and calls to getContextClassLoader should be checked for a null reference.

This is quite surprising since I've seen a couple of open source projects unchecked calls to getContextClassLoader (which got me to checking this in the first place). Specifically, this line in [codemodel](https://codemodel.dev.java.net/): [JCodeModel.java line 358](https://codemodel.dev.java.net/source/browse/codemodel/trunk/codemodel/codemodel/src/main/java/com/sun/codemodel/JCodeModel.java?annotate=158)

(I just verified that log4j doesn't check as well)

So should calls to getContextClassLoader check for a null reference or is something messed up with my threads?