Legacy classes
A good example of classes that you don't need is the set of classes in the JRE related to CORBA. Ever heard of CORBA? If you haven't, don't despair. It's for a reason! It's an old technology that was introduced to the Java runtime back in version 1.4. It has mostly fallen out of popular use since then. Considering most applications don't use the CORBA technology anymore, wouldn't it be great if apps could be bundled with JREs that do not contain the unnecessary CORBA classes?
That's unfortunately not possible, again, because of rt.jar. Since everything gets bundled into a single runtime JAR, you cannot pick and choose what features you need. Everybody gets everything. And since the runtime has been increasing in size, so has ...
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