horizon-airdef/docs/launcher-preparation.md

Launcher resource preparation

Release folders include exporters/server, exporters/client and an integrity manifest. These contain only Horizon's original Java exporter classes. Minecraft jars, libraries, assets and generated resources remain local and are verified against research-lock.json. The same platform-independent class bundle is used in game and dedicated-server releases.

The release runner compiles the server and client source sets separately with javac --release <pinned major> -proc:none -encoding UTF-8, resolving shared helpers once per classpath. It checks every class and its signatures with -Xverify:all against the pinned jars. The release job also compares two fresh isolated preparations with a fresh batched preparation using a runtime-only Java home:

cargo build --release -p horizon-prepare
# Requires already imported Minecraft files in .local/minecraft/<version>.
target/release/horizon-prepare compile-exporters
# Copy server/, client/ and manifest.json from the printed folder into exporters/.
python3 tools/check_prepare_exporters.py --binary target/release/horizon-prepare

Development checkouts and changed sources compile on demand, into .local/exporters/<sha256>. The key covers Java sources (including implicit helpers), pinned dependency checksums and compiler settings. Class checksums detect missing or damaged outputs. Compilation happens in a private staging folder before publishing a complete cache entry. Sources and paths are normalized so one release bundle works on all three platforms.

Compatible exporters run sequentially through one server JVM and one client JVM. Both keep Minecraft's initialized built-in registries. Every task restores the original registry tags before replying; failures stop preparation. Collision exports share the first generated registry and collision files, encoded block states and shape grids within the server worker. Ordinary parity oracle processes keep their existing behavior.

Command-registry and creative-tab exporters remain separate processes: they install data components as well as tags. The data generator also remains separate. Inspection of pinned net.minecraft.data.Main.main showed that it calls Util.shutdownExecutors after running its providers. Calling it inside a worker would shut down shared executors; incorporating its providers directly needs a separate comparison of registry and executor lifetimes. Fresh release preparation therefore starts five exporter/data-generator JVMs, down from 18, and invokes no compiler. HORIZON_PREPARE_ISOLATED=1 retains separate exporter JVMs for output comparisons and diagnosis.

tools/check_prepare_exporters.py requires identical resource file sets and identical bytes for every file stable across the two isolated runs. For the three known noisy JSON files, it also requires semantic equality after normalizing object key order, opaque JVM lambda addresses and creative-tab tag set order. Other variation fails the release check.

On Linux with Java 25, two comparisons produced 23,204 matching resource files each. The first isolated runs took 178.95 s and 104.25 s, versus 45.05 s batched; the second took 100.03 s and 176.06 s, versus 120.09 s batched. All used precompiled exporters. These are fresh output directories with a warm OS file cache, on a machine with other workloads; the spread between isolated runs prevents treating this as a controlled speedup estimate. The compiler saving is separate: release preparation removes the previously measured 15 compiler invocations (29–52 s).