Requires runtime considered?

[Christian Beikov]

Hello experts,

I am in the process of modularizing one of my projects and hit some 
rather annoying limitations that requires me to change parts of my build 
and dependencies due to the way the Java module system works.

I usually have modules like x-api, x-impl and x-testsuite where I have a 
compile time dependency from x-impl to x-api. In x-testsuite I only code 
against x-api, so I define a Maven runtime dependency on x-impl in order 
for my CDI container to pick up the implementations. The annoying part 
is that with modularization I now need to declare my dependency in 
x-testsuite on x-impl as compile time dependency, because otherwise I 
can't list the module in the module-info. If I don't list the module, 
then it is not "visible" to the CDI container, which I guess is on 
purpose, even though it probably ends up in the module path.

Is that by design that classes are not visible if no module depends on a 
module like x-impl in such a scenario, or is that maybe something that 
could work and should be improved in the CDI implementation? I was 
thinking that if "requires runtime ..." were allowed without checking 
that the module is available during compilation, this would work fine. 
Did this idea come up before already?

Regards,

Christian