I remember this from... 11 or so years ago, i think. I was making some Java applet based game and the slow startup time and big JVM download was something that an issue among people making such games (which by the time i was into were dying - although they'd soon get a short lived shot in the arm thanks to Minecraft, but that was later). There were some posts in javagaming.org forums from some people who were talking with Sun (that was before Oracle - Sun at the time was actually interested into uses of Java in gaming and talked with devs, including from smaller/indie developers) about a new improvement for the VM to modularize the packages so that only things that are required would be loaded (faster startup) and the default JVM download would be much smaller (sort of comparable to Flash) which was a big issue at the time for those making web-based games (that niche for Java games would soon die with the introduction of Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3, although it took a bit for people to actually upgrade).<p>I remember it was released at some point, but at the end it didn't amount to much since most of the JVM's actual implementation relied on everything else and the "optional" bits were only a small part, so it didn't help almost at all with applets. And by that time Java applet gaming was dead (it never reached Flash gaming's heights, but for a few years in the early/mid 2000s it was still something you could make a living off - if you didn't expect much).<p>I never heard about it much after that and personally moved away from Java with Flash becoming dominant on the web game scene and soon with Oracle being an dick to everyone. The only reason i used Java was for NetBeans' GUI editor for my tools but with Lazarus [0] becoming very stable by that time and NetBeans looking and behaving weird in my -then- brand new iMac, i abandoned Java for good (the only active Java project i still have is a tilemap editor [1] but this only if you stretch "active" to "hack on it a little every few years").<p>I also never liked Java much after Java 1.4 - it moved further away from its "simple language" roots and i liked how everything was solved in the library instead of adding extra stuff to the language. Well, that, and things like generics felt very "bolted on" while annotations like `@override` felt unnecessary verbosity (and ugly syntax-wise).<p>My favorite Java was probably around 1.1 or so (i have a book on that too), some times i think i should make a new language and VM after it but i lose interest quickly - i think i have a bunch of parsers for Java-1.1-like languages lying around in my backups, from every time i get that urge :-P.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.lazarus-ide.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lazarus-ide.org/</a>
[1] <a href="http://runtimeterror.com/rep/mapas" rel="nofollow">http://runtimeterror.com/rep/mapas</a>