Here a list of RFEs and BUGs related to making HotSpot AOT logic more maintainable, robust, understandable, or evolvable.

Leave a comment on this RFE if you think you see a problem in the sources, but your idea about how to fix it is not specific enough for an RFE. We'll generate the RFEs together.

General areas of work:

 - decoupling the VM from AOT design, moving AOT logic into Java code
 - removing limitations (or, clarifying limitations)
 - improving toolability, transparency, configurability
 - replacing temporary tactics that have not aged well
 - separating or refactoring AOT logic relative to normal (JIT) HotSpot logic

Specific work items (this list will change over time):

- contract adjustments for stable, and usage corrections
- Mat C.’s hook for ending training runs (small API upgrade)
- fix for handling signed JARs (minor bug in PIT)
- fix for class loader table overflow (minor bug in PIT)
- cleanups for bootstrap orchestration (this is open-ended)
- clarify user model for integer box cache, when using AOT cache
- get rid of the “scratch object” lifecycle in AOT processing
- simplify Java heap walk during assembly phase (Ioi has ideas on this)
- make SoftReference safe to use in the assembly phase
- add more VM checks to exclude surprises in initialization order during boot-up
- maybe also annotation driven design rule checks in the VM (no-AOT, must-AOT, etc.)
- add more logging options to extract info from TR or AP
- add some "VM oracle" commands to modify AP activities
- make a simplified one-step workflow that creates the AOT cache directly from the TR
- do performance tuning (e.g., pretouch pages during boot-up)