Right, I'm saying it would be nice to have the option of a guaranteed order. As an example, in my current application, I add five constraint violations at once if specific conditions are not met, so you would get something like:

Invalid password: {numMin} of the following conditions must be met:
At least {numLC} lowercase characters.
At least {numUC} uppercase characters.
At least {numSC} special characters.
At least {numNC} digits.

I am adding these constraints using validatorContext.buildConstraintViolationWithTemplate(message).addConstraintViolation(), which puts the items in an ArrayList. Later, they are moved to a HashSet, and then to a String[] array for display.

So the question is: why keep order intact when adding constraints (ArrayList) and displaying constraints (String[]), but not in between?

Obviously, the HashSet randomly jumbles the order of messages, which then make no sense. Using a LinkedHashSet in the implementation instead would keep the order intact.

As it is, I am currently implementing my own <custom:errors> JSP tag which sorts the messages by a number prefix it then removes, which is of course suboptimal.