You are correct and I apologize for the misimpression.
`native-image -jar helloworld.jar helloworld` did take a whopping 17 seconds to compile, what might be the smallest possible project. That does makes me worry for iterations trying to get better perf in a context where startup overhead matters, BUT the executable it produced did run much faster - only about 1.8x slower than `tcc -run`:
97.0 +- 1.7 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead
98.2 +- 2.8 μs awk '{}'/n
Perl has 2 more shared libraries for ld.so to link, but is somehow faster. So, there may still be some room for improvement, but anyway, thank you for the correction.
(Also, I included 4 of the faster comparative programs to show additionally that the error bars are vaguely credible. In truth, on time shared OSes, the distributions have heavier tails than Gaussian and so a single +- is inadequate.)
--
EDIT: So, the ld.so/dynamic linking overhead was bothering me. I had to get a musl + zlib build environment going, but I did after a few minutes and then found this result with a fully statically linked binary executable:
398.2 +- 4.2 μs ./helloworld-sta>/n
(I should have noted earlier that /n -> /dev/null is just a convenience symlink I put on all my systems. Also, this is all on Linux 6.18.2 and the same CPU as before.)
Also, only around 4.2 MiB of RSS compared to ~1.8 MiB for dash & awk. So, 2.4x the space and only ~4X the time of static awk & dash. That might sound like criticism, but those are usually the efficiency champs. The binary size is kind of hefty (~2x like the RAM use):
$ size *sta
text data bss dec hex filename
2856644 3486552 3184 6346380 60d68c helloworld-sta
So, I guess, in 2026, Java start-up overhead is pretty acceptable. I hope that these "real numbers" can maybe add some precision to the discussion. Someone saying "mere milliseconds" just does not mean as much to me as 400 +- 4 microseconds, and perhaps there are others like me.