Oh shit, you're right. I thought it was java and not javac. My middle night toilet writing on HN failed. :) It makes much more sense because "why would you have a plugin at runtime and not just pass a classpath or jar?" Still, maven and all tools, including language servers, that could compile or interpret it outside of a pom.xml would need that detail or they would break.

This topic makes me think of what other sort of compile-time mutation plugins could be had, including streamlining customizations with a per-project convention. Maybe Erlang bit syntax and matching for Java?