But I thought the idea was that we don't know what annotations we're interested in at the time the classes are scanned. Isn't that the whole point? So we have to index all of them (unless there is some hint from the user that scanning is not necessary for a class or package or whatever) and remember (sans-classloading) where annotations are located, and the relationships between classes, so that we can find all classes and subclasses with certain annotations without actually loading any classes. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4261282#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...