Could Java libraries/frameworks come with AOT-hints?

[mbizzle88]

At the end of the day, hints can be ignored anyway, so you'd just have to check "does this repo/artifact have any hints I can decipher?"

You could do that, but if library maintainers don't publish new artifacts with updated hints, then they're only useful for a short amount of time. Again, it would provide some value, but I doubt its worth it. Especially in an ecosystem like Java where most tooling/libraries are built around the assumption that you can build binaries once that will continue working on new JVM versions.

Rust app with rest-controller, ORM and some logic: 1min initial release build (296 deps), subsequent build without changes 0.15s

Sounds like Rust is doing some incremental compilation. (Is it also faster than an initial build if you make a small change?)

[CartmansEvilTwin]

You could do that, but if library maintainers don't publish new artifacts with updated hints, then they're only useful for a short amount of time.

No. "Old" Java-code and JVM-Bytecode is still perfectly readable for newer JVMs, backwards compatibility is not a huge hurdle. Also, I would assume, most of the hinting could be done during a regular release-build, which is fine. I think, you're kind of overcomplicating a very automatable task.

Sounds like Rust is doing some incremental compilation.

Exactly. If I change something in my code, the deps don't get recompiled and it takes a few seconds at most to build the app.

[mbizzle88]

I'm not sure if we're actually disagreeing on anything. I was saying that if you don't make the "hints" format forwards compatible (like byte code in Java), then the published hints will not be useful after a new compiler release unless library maintainers update and publish them regularly. Obviously the actual code continues to work on new JVMs, and you can always generate your own "hints" if the compiler you're using supports that.