[news.eclipse.platform] Launching Eclipse without the eclipse binary ?

[Achille <achille@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings
While trying to discover why eclipse was taking so long to load (1.5+
minutes, I found something interesting: Eclipse loads just fine by
simply $ java -jar startup.jar

On top of that the startup time is aproximately ~7 seconds. Certain
plugins seem to work fine (Vi/BIRT/MyEclipse)
While the initial heap is fairly small, it should not be a problem to
add extra params for that.

Two questions:
a) Is this safe? 
b) what does the eclipse binary really do? Where are the docs for the
binary?