[potatosareok]

Upvoted you because I agree. JVM has many strong points but I don't think anyone is disputing that startup time is a weakness. I've used some java tools that you invoke from a command line and I'm always slightly annoyed by how slow they are.

As an aside - I was trying to reduce -Xmx to improve HelloWorld startup (lol idk...) and Xmx smaller then 1024k and it couldn't start up with less then 1024k so there's that.

On my windows computer (also I barely know what I'm doing so probably even timing it wrong).

  [Mon Mar 09 03:22:31 zebra@ZEBRA:~ ]
  $ time a.exe
  Hello, world
  real    0m0.098s
  user    0m0.015s
  sys     0m0.015s
  [Mon Mar 09 03:22:34 zebra@ZEBRA:~ ]
  $ time java Hello
  Hello, world!

  real    0m0.285s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.031s

[unstabilo]

Hello World execution time benchmark in many languages:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/m...

With Haskell:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2011-03/m...

[lmm]

Worry about -Xms rather than -Xmx for startup times.

I suspect there are ways to make it faster (e.g. there's a nashorn runner that starts up appreciably faster than "proper" java), but the main use case for java is server-side programs that run for days or weeks between restarts, so it's optimized for that use case.

[kyllo]

the main use case for java is server-side programs that run for days or weeks between restarts, so it's optimized for that use case.

Unfortunately for the folks who still have to use Java desktop software written in Swing.