How does incremental mode work?
In incremental mode, ajc minimizes the files that need to be recompiled after another file has changed. In Java, only the changed files need to be recompiled, but in AspectJ, other files might also need to be recompiled or re-woven. Depending on what is modified, we may need to re-weave code. If you change a pointcut and save it, we currently have to check everywhere in case a new match is occurring or an old match is no longer correct. However, if you simply change the body of an advice in an aspect, there is (usually) no need to reweave as the affected classes call the advice and the advice (by design) maintains its name in the recompiled aspect. If you make a change to a class (as opposed to an aspect) and save it, we usually can get away with merely having to compile that class then weave the existing aspects with it – rather than doing a full recompile of the entire system. There are a lot of possible optimizations to the algorithms we use, by performing more complete analysis of
