This week I gave a talk at Devoxx Belgium titled “The fast startup landscape is expanding!” which shows the set of options for faster startup and how that set is growing. The talk touches on everything from CDS/AppCDS/DynamicCDS & SharedClasses to GraalVM Native Image to CRIU solutions (like Project CRaC and OpenJ9 CRIU Support) and finally to what we need from OpenJDK’s Project Leyden.

One of the key points is that any fast startup solution needs to provide 3 key things:

• Class metadata
• Heap archives
• AOT compiled code

though they may provide them in very different ways.

All solutions require changes to our existing code. There’s no magic dust to make existing code fast without doing anything (short of upgrading to the latest release).

Talk recording and slides are available.