Upvoted you because I agree. JVM has many strong points but I don't think anyone is disputing that startup time is a weakness. I've used some java tools that you invoke from a command line and I'm always slightly annoyed by how slow they are.
As an aside - I was trying to reduce -Xmx to improve HelloWorld startup (lol idk...) and Xmx smaller then 1024k and it couldn't start up with less then 1024k so there's that.
On my windows computer (also I barely know what I'm doing so probably even timing it wrong).
[Mon Mar 09 03:22:31 zebra@ZEBRA:~ ]
$ time a.exe
Hello, world
real 0m0.098s
user 0m0.015s
sys 0m0.015s
[Mon Mar 09 03:22:34 zebra@ZEBRA:~ ]
$ time java Hello
Hello, world!
real 0m0.285s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.031s
Worry about -Xms rather than -Xmx for startup times.
I suspect there are ways to make it faster (e.g. there's a nashorn runner that starts up appreciably faster than "proper" java), but the main use case for java is server-side programs that run for days or weeks between restarts, so it's optimized for that use case.
As an aside - I was trying to reduce -Xmx to improve HelloWorld startup (lol idk...) and Xmx smaller then 1024k and it couldn't start up with less then 1024k so there's that.
On my windows computer (also I barely know what I'm doing so probably even timing it wrong).