The current sorting mechanism is a funky one. A toposort is easy to write and helpful for fast sorting of modules (like how forge sort mods) Just a reminder. If someone wants to write one, it's welcome, too.

Oh by the way I might write a tarjan's scc to detect cycles, too.

It's not "funky", its just a depth first search topological algorithm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting#Depth-first_search

Never said it was efficient, just that it wasn't funky or unusual. =P

Are annotations actually that slow?

The issue is the construction of load order that is inefficient.

In my opinion, we should pull dependency information to local variables to speed up the process instead of looking up in the annotation repeatedly at the same time.