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

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

With Haskell:

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

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.

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

> time for x in $(seq 1 100); do ./helloworld.py ; done

    real    0m1.240s
    user    0m0.902s
    sys     0m0.343s

Java for comparison:

> time for x in $(seq 1 100); do java Hw; done

    real    0m4.952s
    user    0m4.051s
    sys     0m1.071s

     > java -version
     java version "1.7.0_72"
     Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_72-b14)
     Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.72-b04, mixed mode)