Excessive use of import wildcards

[Gerd Rosarius]

Hello folks,

currently I am involved in a complex Java project. For me this mean, fighting through a huge bunch of classes written by several programmers. The software itself lacks performance heavily.

Beside architectural problems I see excessive use of import wildcards like

import java.util.*

instead of

import java.util.vector

.

I know that this is far away from beeing good coding style but does it lead to reduced performance at runtime, too? Any ideas?

H.-Gerd

[Jeroen Wenting]

All it does is potentially cause the compilation of the source to be a bit slower and/or take a bit more memory.
It doesn't affect runtime performance in the least.

And remember: whether it's good or bad coding style depends on personal preference.
I've seen conclusive arguments for using only wildcard imports, only specific class level imports, or any type of mix of the two according to whichever seemingly arbitrary rule.

[Ilja Preuss]

Jeroen is right. In fact, imports are just a convenience for the developer - they don't have any effect on the generated byte code at all. The byte code always only contains fully qualified class names.