Yes the development experience is unfortunately a problem for all the optimizing Ruby runtimes. TruffleRuby with its SubstrateVM precompiling improves this situation quite a bit for trivial commands, but still takes longer than CRuby to boot any large application (e.g. Rails). I have plans to try to improve startup in JRuby using some new AOT compilation and code caching features of Java 10.
That will be brilliant Charles. Too be honest I think if we can keep the main JVM process up and running but get code reloaded that would probably smooth things a lot.
I sort of hope that we, the rest of the community, could take care of that for you. Although faster start up would be awesome in general.
I believe much of the work on forking preloaders could be modified to work with a single JRuby JVM process, or with the Drip JVM preloader. Hopefully we'll have time to make that happen, or someone from the community will step up to help us!
