01 · Performance launcher and companion app
Preflight
A cross-platform performance launcher and mod-analysis toolkit for heavily modded Starsector. The work combines reverse-engineering an obfuscated JVM runtime, moving deterministic work to reusable boundaries, exact fallback when those proofs stop holding, and a desktop product around the same Java engine.
What changed
- The 83-mod development arc moved from a recent ordinary 112.17-second launch to 13.69 seconds. Five loader-specific data caches exposed a lower shared boundary, where repeated JSON/CSV work moved into one memoized read layer and typed-tree representation.
- The storage/runtime work spans a ~27-second serialized texture-prefetch bottleneck, 1.22 GiB of removed VRAM padding, texture preparation from 200.77s to 16.21s with storage from 4.76 GB to ~1.1 GB, and the same texture corpus launching 33.53s alphabetically versus 14.174s in observed access order.
- Generated-code work memoized 228 Janino compilation requests and then collapsed 36,332 generated-class occurrences to 280 unique classes. Campaign work replaced sector-wide scans with mutation-tracked indexes and short-circuited 117.9M unchanged commodity recomputations.
- The same engine now powers a Windows/macOS/Linux desktop app with React over a Rust/Tauri host, a bundled Java runtime, durable launch/playtime history, storage and recovery tooling, diagnostics, and signed updates with rollback.
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