The real thing that is missing is a runtime annotation scanning API. Spring does this my examining the class path, casting it to a urlclasspath, finding all th

The real thing that is missing is a runtime annotation scanning API. Spring does this my examining the class path, casting it to a urlclasspath, finding all the zip/jar files, unzipping them and then parsing the byte code. Interestingly the set let spec added annotation scanning too. And now if your not careful you jar files get extracted three times. The JVM, the server conteainer and spring all repeating the same work. No wonder people think java is slow to start up.