Forkable OpenJDK...is it madness?

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:
> It exists, and it´s a work-around, but it works very well... nailgun. ;-)
>
> http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/

Nailgun is a fairly limited solution that isn't really comparable to fork:

* There's no process isolation; one bad "nail" can seal the coffin.
* There's no simple way to do prefork-style initialization; each
"nail" must explicitly share the *same* in-memory resources, or
initialize its own
* Signal handling does not work properly across the nailgun process
wire (could be improved, but it's still emulating signal handling atop
a wire protocol)

JRuby already ships with Nailgun, and we recommend it as a possible
for solution to improve startup of quick tasks, but it's no fork.

- Charlie