INingve·Apr 15, 2023Submission
Nailgun: Running Java programs from command line without JVM startup overhead
6 points · Open discussionfacebookarchive
nailgun
Java2012–2023
facebookarchive / nailgun · Archived
nailgun
Nailgun is a client, protocol, and server for running Java programs from the command line without incurring the JVM startup overhead.
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
731GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Nailgun is a client, protocol, and server for running Java programs from the command line without incurring the JVM startup overhead.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-11-27 18:29:34 UTC to 2023-04-15 18:39:32 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesthis is a myth, AOT is generally slower than JIT for high level languages.
Yes though prewarming is underused and important see e.g. https://github.com/facebook/nailgun
In .NET 7 introduces Native AOTI believe that startup time is already a solved problem
https://github.com/facebook/nailgun
There is also https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2020-April/0...
In RedHat Mandrel Makes Java NativeMight want to check out https://github.com/facebook/nailgun
In Epsilon: The JDK’s Do-Nothing Garbage CollectorSetting aside GC, nailgun (JDK <= 8?) and drip already solves/d short-running VMs. This is often how to speed-up CLI tools like JRuby, ant, mvn, sbt, etc.
Also these help reduce load times:
- Class Data Sharing (CDS; JDK 5+) https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/vm/class-data-shar...
- Application Class Data Sharing (AppCDS; JDK 10+)
https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/310
- Ahead-Of-Time compilation (AOT; jaotc; JDK 9+ Linux-x86_64 only):
http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/295
- JVM runtime trimmer (jlink; JDK 9+): http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/282
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Drip: https://github.com/ninjudd/drip
Nailgun:
https://github.com/facebook/nailgun
http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun
In Epsilon: The JDK’s Do-Nothing Garbage CollectorQuite interesting. Any performance/feature comparison with nailgun [1]? We have found that useful for Hadoop hdfs commands, though haven't tried it for spark,tez etc.
1. https://github.com/facebook/nailgun
In Understand and Eliminate JVM Warm-Up Overhead in Data-Parallel Systems (2016) [pdf]Our rails app generates dozens of accounting related reports on the fly in HTML and we use Flying Saucer to generate a PDF version -
https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer
To help minimize request time, we keep Flying Saucer persisted with Nailgun -
https://github.com/martylamb/nailgun
For generating checks, IRS forms and other PDFs that involve precise formatting we use Prawn -
https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
In Ask HN: What do you use for PDF reports these days?