2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

> started in a reasonable amount of time

A hasty generalization with a little confirmation bias, perhaps?

    $ time keenwrite.bin --version
    KeenWrite version 3.6.5
    Copyright 2016-2025 White Magic Software, Ltd.

    user 0m0.329s

From Claude:

> It's worth noting this is a common perception about Java, and there's some historical truth to it (especially with Swing desktop applications from the 2000s). However, the absolute statement "no Java app... ever" is the fallacy - it's an overgeneralization from limited personal experience to a universal claim.

It was successful for a while. Java applets were once fairly common. But then Flash largely replaced them, and then Html5 killed them flat.

Regarding slow startups, I am not sure this applies to any use cases I can think of where it would not also be a concern in python, etc. JVM startup times have never meaningfully impacted my workflow in the last 15 years.

The why is quite simple, in my opinion. I see java devs reaching for other accepted tools for such things and opening a whole can of worms by introducing a new language that is only "required" by convention. I would love a rich java ecosystem of TUI/CLI libraries to reuse all of my existing business logic and company libraries. The lack of extremely streamlined wrappers is the only barrier. In my work environment, this would be a great addition.

I had no idea what brief was until I read the env var api key docs in the subdirectory. I think you should not lead with "it's a tui4j app!" and "it's terminal chat!". It's a terminal OpenAI ChatGPT interface. Screenshot wouldn't hurt either, given it's an advertisement for the presentation library.

I'm sorry, but this is a big load of crap and that includes some of the comments in here. Java enthusiasts are the absolute world champions of sugarcoating the shortcomings of Java and the JVM in general.

This is what writing a CLI application in Go looks like: you download Go and immediately have all the tools needed to manage dependencies, write applications, and compile them into lightweight, distributable binaries with a simple command.

Now, let’s consider how this process looks in Java. First, you need to download A(!) JDK – and there are multiple ones. Many newcomers struggle with the variety of JDKs, but let's move past that. The JDK alone doesn’t handle dependencies; it’s highly likely you’ll end up using either Maven or Gradle, both of which are complex and tiresome, requiring you to deal with either XML (Maven) or Groovy/Kotlin. What seems to be missed is the potential of tools like JBang, which should ideally come out of the box. The Scala people addressed this effectively with scala-cli which is now the default Scala runner. Anyway, you’re still far from finished. You've just figured out how to write applications; now you need to figure out how to distribute them. This involves understanding jpackage – if you want an application smaller than 100MB, you’ll likely need to use jlink beforehand. And, heaven forbid, your application uses Java 9+ modules, as then you'll be wrestling with the complexities of modularity itself. If you’ve managed to navigate all of this, you’ll end up with an application that includes a bundled JRE. A compressed, modularized “hello world” application can easily size at least 30MB and take several hundred milliseconds to start.

Then there's Graal Native, which allows you to compile your applications ahead of time into natively executable binaries. However, compiling Java applications ahead of time is complicated by runtime class initialization, reflection etc. which is why the Graal compiler needs significant configuration beforehand. There are tracing agents to help you compile such configurations, but even with them, it’s incredibly tiresome and not always reliable. Furthermore, the produced binaries tend to be large and don't play well with upx.

I think the JDK developers could learn from Scala CLI, which is now the default Scala runner. I'm convinced it would really help Java if it came with something like that out of the box.