Could extra imports in Java slow down code loading time?

Question

Is it possible that adding more import statements to your java code could slow down the time it takes to load your classes into the JVM?

Answer 1

No, imports are only used in compilation to find class references. Add unused imports and they don't do anything. To put it another way:

import java.util.*;

simply means you can write:

Map map = new HashMap();

instead of:

java.util.Map map = new java.util.HashMap();

That's all it does.