JEP 220: Modular Run-Time Images

[Tim Boudreau]

Ditching JAR file format is going to wreak havoc with IDEs, build tools and
any sort of analysis tool that utilizes javac's API or internals (I've
written some), or anything that looks for the .jar file extension.

I agree with the need for a replacement (though technically, you could put
whatever precomputed structures you want in a JAR, just not as efficiently
as is desirable), but it seems like something that's a little big for a
line-item in a proposal about something else.

A non-disruptive approach would be to keep the file extension and enhance
JarInputStream et. al. to transparently treat new JARs as if they were old
JARs.  Is something like that being considered?

-Tim