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by mike_hearn 409 days ago
It's possible and in recent years the ecosystem has been evolving to support it much better via native-image metadata. Lots of libraries have metadata now that indicates what's accessed via reflection and the static DCE optimization keeps getting better. It can do things like propagate constants to detect more code as dead. Even large server frameworks like Micronaut or Spring Native support it now.

The other nice thing is that bytecode is easy to modify, so if you have a library that has some features you know you don't want, you can just knock it out and bank the savings.