Right, you can trim the JDK - that's true but I think the "problem" is a bit more general. I'll give you a more concrete example. I have some small application and it needed to do some basic image manipulation. So I bring in BoofCV and do the manipulation. However I then see that BoofCV drags in all sorts of crazy stuff to do with machine learning and whatnot - along with a sea of irrelevant dependencies

- I can keep around the bloat

- I can try to find an 3rd tier library with less eyeballs that's smaller and does less (If I later want to do more image manipulation I might find myself in a bind)

- I can try to manually go in and trim out the stuff I think I'm not using (not that I really understand the BoofCV internals..)

So the ecosystem is actively discourages me from using large mature libraries :( (I ended up using option 3 with trial and error)

Graal maybe sidesteps the issue. Yeah it has reflections, but as you say you need to be explicit about them. So the rest can be trimmed.

I guess my original loaded question was implying that maybe this will make library developers more keen on dropping reflections internally (it's honestly almost never a good design choice anyway)

That all being said.. I think 90% of people are writing some server-side web stuff and none of this matters to them :)

> GraalWASM

I'm kinda curious about the other way around. Running JVM byte code on WASM. Not in any serious way.. but it'd be cool you could run an uberjar in the browser. A quick search brings up a few ongoing projects :)