Jarreorder and classlists

[Erik Joelsson]

Hello,

I wonder if anyone knows more about the jarreorder tool and why we use it?

As I understand it, we have precalculated classlists for each platform 
(most likely outdated) and the tool is used to make sure those classes 
end up in a specific order, last in rt.jar. I assume this is some kind 
of startup time optimization.

I got some help from Claes in the performance team and did a quick run 
of a startup and footprint benchmark, comparing a build with the rt.jar 
reordered as normal and one where I simply turned off this feature and 
let the files end up in the default order. Our preliminary findings show 
that any difference between the two is negligible. Before we declare it 
useless, we might need to test with freshly generated classlists? Does 
anyone know how to generate them? Is there some other benefit of this 
that I might have missed?

I would like to propose removing jarreorder to simplify the build. This 
would also enable faster incremental builds of the images target, by not 
having to rebuild the whole rt.jar every time.

/Erik