Code search and navigation are important features of any IDE. In Java, one of the commonly used search options is searching for all implementations of an interface. This feature is often called Type Hierarchy, and it looks just like the image on the right.

It's inefficient to iterate over all project classes when this feature is invoked. One option is to save the complete class hierarchy in the index during compilation since the compiler builds it anyway. We do this when the compilation is run by the IDE and not delegated, for example, to Gradle. But this works only if nothing has been changed in the module after the compilation. In general, the source code is the most up-to-date information provider, and indexes are based on the source code.

Finding immediate children is a simple task if we are not dealing with a functional interface. When searching for implementations of the Foo interface, we need to find all the classes that have implements Foo and interfaces that have extends Foo, as well as new Foo(...) {...} anonymous classes. To do this, it is enough to build a syntax tree of each project file in advance, find the corresponding constructs, and add them to an index.