[never 3 dec 96]
Currently the way the compiler handles initialized arrays is to emit inline code which fills in the values in a newly created array. But it doesn't really need to fill in values that are 0 since the new array should already be full of the default values. This doesn't occur all that often I suspect but there currently in sun.io there are some staggeringly large class files as a result of the way array are initialized. Many of these arrays are large contain a lot of 0's. The savings would be around 15% for the files in sun.io if the compiler were modified to just not emit 0's when initializing an array.

I think all that needs to be done is to change the code around line 110 in sun/tools/tree/ArrayExpression.java to look like this:

        for (int i = 0 ; i < args.length ; i++) {
            if (args[i].equalsDefault()) // new code
              continue; // new code
            asm.add(where, opc_dup);

I have no need for this but it seems like it might be a useful optimization. It seems there might be some other simple improvments to the code for initializing arrays...