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Rise and fall of JVM languages

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Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#3

Post by lucian1900 »

amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

It's largely to do with standard library class loading. The only way to avoid this is an alternate compilation model, like GCJ (and other native code compilers) or Dalvik.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#4

Post by pebers »

amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Presumably it isn't easy to start everything the JVM needs & does in effectively no time. Although to be fair it actually is fairly quick for a "hello world" type program - much of the startup time of Java programs tends to be loading bytecode of their dependencies rather than starting the JVM itself.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#6

Post by amelius »

pebers wrote: post #4
amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Presumably it isn't easy to start everything the JVM needs & does in effectively no time. Although to be fair it actually is fairly quick for a "hello world" type program - much of the startup time of Java programs tends to be loading bytecode of their dependencies rather than starting the JVM itself.

Isn't it possible to do lazy-loading in the JVM?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#7

Post by kybernetikos »

amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

A few years back I built a system that ran in the background and spun up fresh JVMs, which it then kept in readiness. When you wanted to start something, it would use the waiting one so you avoided the slowdown. Well, it was still pretty slow...

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#8

Post by ztjio »

amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Well I am a Java guy and have two points to make.

First. What are you even talking about?

  Quiet:test user$ time java Test
  Test
  
  real	0m0.104s
  user	0m0.074s
  sys	0m0.028s
  Quiet:test user$
That's on a current MBP 13" top end.

And second: Who cares? What us "Java guys" do with Java, well, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it takes half a second to start. Because, we deploy to running processes. "We" power things like Hadoop clusters. The startup time is meaningless in "our realm" and frankly, I think if you're wondering about java for something like command line tools, it's just the wrong tool for the job for many reasons. And if you're looking at GUI apps, it's still better than Electron :P

So seriously, Hacker News, what is the obsession with this?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#9

Post by Insanity »

I'm surprised to see that Groovy slightly beats Kotlin in on that graph. I really underestimated Groovy popularity, or overestimated Kotlin.

I've yet to work with Kotlin but did like Groovy some years ago. Never used it professionaly though, only for play-projects.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#10

Post by chrisseaton »

amelius wrote: post #6
pebers wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably it isn't easy to start everything the JVM needs & does in effectively no time. Although to be fair it actually is fairly quick for a "hello world" type program - much of the startup time of Java programs tends to be loading bytecode of their dependencies rather than starting the JVM itself.

Isn't it possible to do lazy-loading in the JVM?

The JVM does do lazy-loading.
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