Tim Bray: But while I’m debugging it I’m eating the startup delay all the time, and at the moment, it’s brutal; I mean seriously bad. The JRuby guys have been doing some pretty bold chest-beating about how fast JRuby’s gonna be—bolder than I’d be in their position—but at the moment it’s kind of sucky to develop in.

The Java start-up time is the number one ill of the whole Java phenomenon. This single fault killed the Java applet concept, and spawned the application server market: "Hey, that Java thing starts so slowly, why don't we pre-start a Java process, and cramp all of our applications into that one instance."

It really is unforgivable that after ten years, we are still suffering from the slow-start-ness of Java.

I have a 2.0GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and a 80GB hard drive (A bottom of the line laptop as of July 2006). I want my Java start up time to be cut down to a point where I can't feel it.

Make it go on stand-by mode. Make it hibernate to a 500MB file. Compile the darn thing down to native code (I've JIT it the whole thing millions of times.) Turn off verification (I've verified the whole thing a million times.)

Something can be done, can it?

P.S. I said Open Source Sun-Java instead of Open Source Java because there are already two major Open Source Javas out there: The GNU gcj which ships with Fedora Linux since Core 2, and Apache Harmony, which is shaping up to be a fantastic Java implementation.

Some would say they are not complete and don't pass the compatibility test. And guess what, the Open Source Java that Sun will release won't be complete either. They are releasing pieces of it at a time. And won't contain the whole thing that constitute the current day JDK when they are all done with it early next year.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on August 18, 2006 8:02:45 AM CDT #