[thu2111]

Worth noting that Java has this too now, it's called the "jimage" format. However it's not used for redistribution of compiled artifacts, that's still JARs. Instead a jimage file is created when JARs are "jlinked" into a runtime image.

This requires modules and it's a new technique that post-dates Java 8, so not many Java shops use it yet. However Java 9+ comes optimised this way by default, that's what the 'modules' file is in the JDK lib directory. Class files have their strings extracted and placed into a single string table are compressed, and their offsets then placed into a "perfect hash table" that's guaranteed to satisfy lookups in O(1) or O(2) time.