From the bootstrap performance point of view the {{annotated}} mode allows much better optimization as you don't need to load "unsuitable" classes and fire PAT at all (so if you really care about bootstrap time of a large application, the workaround mentioned in one of the previous comments is the way to go). Memory footprint would be the same compared to {{annotated}}.

add a bean-discovery-mode 'scoped' ---------------------------------- Key: CDI-420 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/CDI-420 Project: CDI Specification Issues Issue Type: Bug Components: Packaging and Deployment Affects Versions: TBD Reporter: Mark Struberg Fix For: 2.0 (discussion) This is for some future CDI release. We currently only have 3 bean-discovery-modes * none * all * annotated The spec also currently says that ProcessAnnotatedType will only get fired (12.4) for • each Java class, interface or enum deployed in an explicit bean archive, and • each Java class with a bean defining annotation in an implicit bean archive. • each session bean Which means that we do not get the ProcessAnnotatedType (PAT) event for any class in an 'annotated' or 'implicit' BDA which does _not_ have a bean defining annotation. It might be useful to fire the ProcessAnnotatedType for all classes, but do not pick them up as Beans if they (after PAT) do not have a valid scope. Effectively doing the processing but not make them @Dependent automatically if there is no scope annotation at the end of the PAT processing. I'm not yet 100% sure how important this distinction is in practice. Just writing this up to not forget about the idea...