For a long time, a lot of people have been wanting the JDK classes to be compiled with debug symbols enabled by default. I believe the reason we haven't so far is to keep footprint down for the JRE image. The usecase for debug information is mainly in the JDK image, which is used for development. The problem so far has then been that we don't want to compile everything twice, once with and once without debug symbols.

With jlink, we now have the option of stripping debug information at link time. This adds a bit of time creating the images, but it's small compared to recompiling all classes. Because of this, I propose that we enable debug symbols for all java compilation in the build by default and add stripping to all images that are footprint sensitive.