In fact, no, it is not a dependency; your code will never see Lombok, only its effects.
Lombok IS a compiler extension. It exploits one of the weirdest features that was introduced in Java 1.6: You can instruct javac to call a custom extension whenever it encounters a certain Annotation. This annotation doesn't need to be on the Applications classpath either.
Weirdly, I haven't see this feature widely exploited by anyone _until_ lombok came around.
Lombok IS a compiler extension. It exploits one of the weirdest features that was introduced in Java 1.6: You can instruct javac to call a custom extension whenever it encounters a certain Annotation. This annotation doesn't need to be on the Applications classpath either.
Weirdly, I haven't see this feature widely exploited by anyone _until_ lombok came around.
Reference: https://openjdk.org/groups/compiler/processing-code.html