•  16-09-2019
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Question

I find java starts up and runs practically instantly for me - but javac takes a few seconds, and ant makes it slower again. It's only a few seconds, but my edit-compile-test loop would be smoother without it. :-)

BTW: I've already used vim's ":make" with ant.

Is there a way to speed up javac and/or ant? I'm thinking of special switches, or tricks? Or maybe an alternative java compiler (I'm using 1.6, in linux)

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Solution

Eclipse does that for you ... but it's probably a bit big as a "patch" for your problem.

That aside, you can roll your own compiler plugin. There are two approaches:

  1. Run the java compiler from within ant (instead of creating a new process). Not sure if ant already does that; if not, that will save you a bit of time. Look at the Java 6 compiler API for details.

  2. Run javac in a server process which listens for options on a socket. In ant, send the process the command line and wait for the output to be sent back. Saves you starting a new process all the time.

  3. Try to use the eclipse compiler. Unlike the original javac, the Eclipse compiler is pretty good at "ignoring" errors, so it can produce class files even when they contain errors. That doesn't seem to mean much but it allows you to compile all the time in the background. When you do your last save (wrapping everything up), the compiler will have been able to compile everything else and will just have to look at a single file.

OTHER TIPS

Google found these two (I haven't tried either yet)

  1. javac -J-client -J-Xms100m -J-Xmx100m <src>

  2. JBrownie "monitors Java sourcecode and automatically recompiles any files found changed" along the lines of Aaron Digulla's (2)

I can strongly recommend using a suitable IDE with Java as the productivity increase with using an editor which knows about your program is immense. Think of "goto the line containing the defintion of the variable/class/field the cursor is on", "rename this class and all references to it", and all other kinds of nice things. If you are annoyed with the time it takes to invoke Java, you might be ready :)

You may want to have a look at JavaRebel

I point all of my output files to a ramdisk that I create with this utility. It speeds up builds a fair bit (Though not to a magical extent) since almost everything is in memory. It's most noticeable when doing a 'clean' build which becomes almost instant.

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