An interface like above to sort things would probably be quite helpful as well.
[0] https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/
archived on 2026-04-12: https://web.archive.org/web/20260412085953/https://peter.sh/...
Same as, say, ANTLR generates code to parse various texts to AST.
I have really come to appreciate modern opinionated tooling like gofmt, that does not come with hundreds to thousands of knobs.
[1]: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/hotspot/share...
In a way you can use this list of JVM options to illustrate how successful Java has become, that everyone needs an option to get it to work how they like it.
As a Java dev, I have maybe used about 10-15 of them in my career.
The weirdest/funnest one I used was for an old Sun Microsystems Solaris server which ran iPlanet, for a Java EE service.
Since this shared resources with some other back of office systems, it was prone to run out of memory.
Luckily there was a JVM option to handle this!
-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="<run command>"
It wasn't too important so we just used to trigger it to restart the whole machine, and it would come back to life. Sometimes we used to mess about and get it to send funny IRC messages like "Immah eaten all your bytez I ded now, please reboot me"
I suggest most people never touch almost any other options. (Flight recording and heap dumps being the exception).
So do we really need multiple thousand? Having all of them also makes finding the few you actually need much more difficult.
Assuming that you don't need 99.9% of them (they should have sane defaults that you never have to change or even learn that they exist or what they are) until that super rare case when one will save your hide, I'd lean towards yes.
In other words, they might as well be an escape hatch of sorts, that goes untouched most of the time, but is there for a reason.
> Having all of them also makes finding the few you actually need much more difficult.
This is a good point! I'd expect the most commonly changed ones (e.g. memory allocation and thread pools) to be decently well documented, on the web and in LLM training data sets. Reading the raw docs will read like noise, however.
In reality the number of options is significantly smaller than the 1843 you mentioned. The list contains boatloads of duplicates because they exist for multiple architectures. E.g. BackgroundCompilation is present on 8 lines on the OpenJDK 25 page: aarch64, arm, ppc, riscv, s390, x86 and twice more without an architecture.
While gofmt is “just” a formatting tool. The interesting part is that go code that doesn’t follow the go formatting standard is rejected by the go compiler. So not only does gofmt not have knobs, you can’t even fork it to add knobs, because the rest of the go ecosystem will outright reject code formatted in any other way.
It’s a rather extreme approach to opinionated tooling. But you can’t argue with the results, nobody writing go on any project ever worries about code formatting.
For example, it’s the compiler and not gofmt that dictates that you must write a curly brace only on the same line of an “if” statement. If you put it on the next line, you don’t have unformatted code - you have a syntax error.
However, the compiler doesn’t care if you have too much whitespace between tokens or if you write your slice like []int{1, 2,3,4}, but gofmt does.
We could say the rules of the compiler and gofmt don’t even overlap.
C has had indent since 1976, then it is only a matter of having a pre-commit hook, regardless of the programming language.
We don't need some monk telling us how to format code from the gospels, a company wide rulling suffices.
The JVM is like an operating system. A better comparison would be Linux kernel parameters: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/kernel-pa...
Nobody has ever tested all possible inputs to 64 bit multiplication either. You can sample from the space.
I.E. Instead of "<DOMAIN> TLS Handshake failed" it will be something like "ERROR: PKIX failed". So now I have to figure out that PKIX is referring to PKI and it would make too much sense to provide the domain that failed. Instead I have to play the guessing game.
Java has proper error messages with a full stack trace that tells the whole story.
Of course individual developers may lazy out on writing useful error messages, but that's hardly a Java issue.
Meanwhile in Go you can be happy to have any error message at all. And then you can hope it's a unique string you can grep in a codebase. Where you only may find a line of code you could have arrived from many different places.
The difference really becomes apparent when trying to debug a customer's problem at 3am (IME).
I do not want a stack trace unless I specifically request it. I am not a Java developer, 10 pages in less showing names of packages I don't even know what they are is not useful. It just muddies the water so that it's much harder to make sense of and spot the relevant line; assuming there is a line that actually states the error. I shouldn't need to know what all those packages are in order to figure out why Confluence crashed again or stopped sending emails.
You can search for those that may concern you. Good old search or AI "search".
For example I recently did test the AOT compilation of Clojure (on top of the JVM) code using "Leyden". I used an abandoned Github project as a base but all the JVM parameters related to Leyden had changed names (!) and the procedure had to be adapted. I did it all (as a Dockerfile) in less than an hour with Sonnet 4.6 (complete with downloading/verifying the Leyden JVM, testing, taking notes about the project, testing on different machines, etc.).
These are not trivial calls to the "java" command: it involves a specific JVM and several JVM params that have to work fine together.
The goal was to load 80 000 Clojure/java classes (not my idea: the original project did that part) and see the results: 1.5 seconds to launch with the Leyden JVM (and correct params) vs 6 seconds for a regular launch (so a 75% gain). GraalVM is even faster but much more complicated/annoying to get right.
It can look overwhelming but I'd say all these parameters are there for a reason and you only need a few of them. But when you need them, you need them.
P.S: unrelated to TFA and as a bonus for the "Java is slow crowd":
time java -jar hello/hello.jar
Hello, World!
real 0m0.040s
I re-used it for I found it's approach to generating 80 000 Clojure classes to then test bare JVM vs Leyden AOT vs full GraalVM startup timing interesting.
Notice how I did not compare to C, but modern alternatives.
Zillions of options. Some important, some not
I kinda feel the same way with C/C++ warnings. Different code bases decide if different warnings are errors. That was a mistake (IMHO).
The other thought I have scanning these options is how many are related to GC. I kinda think GC is a bit of a false economy. It's just hiding the complexity. I wonder if it would've been better to push GC to be pluggable rather than relying on a host of options, a bit like TCP congestion management. I mean there are /proc parameters for that in Linux, for example, but it's also segregated (eg using BRR).
At the end of the day, none of this really matters. As in, the JVM is mature and I think generally respected.
Many of these flags are the equivalent of GODEBUG. GODEBUG does not have 1843 options, but do you know how many it has? Have you ever used GODEBUG? (I'm guessing no, hence, immaturity) And if not, do you think it should just be dropped because you never needed it?
still in the works, but its here for those interested: Petrify: https://github.com/exabrial/petrify
Same as, say, ANTLR generates code to parse various texts to AST.
It works fine for simple models, but breaks down for production-sized tree ensembles. The JVM has a hard 64KB method size limit, and javac controls how your deeply nested if/else trees get laid out. m2cgen's own FAQ says to reduce estimators when you hit recursion limits during generation. With direct bytecode emission I control the method structure precisely, I can split across methods exactly where needed and manage the constant pool directly. I also wrote much more efficient bytecode than m2cgen creates as equivalent source.
The source code is also a pretty useless step, sets off all kinds of static analysis alarms in your stack, and also I worry about source code injection (not that can't happen with petrify, it's just a lot harder).
Finally, I'm grateful for the sweat the authors of m2cgen have put in, but the project has gone without updates for 4 years. That doesn't mean it's useless (some mature software never sees updates), but it's not a positive sign either.
For anyone intered, here's the app:
https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6475267297?pt=11914...
But here it is: JVM is a modern cathedral.
(I know many conflict and there is not a shell buffer long enough to handle all that)
Kidding aside, I actually said "ugh, seriously" when I saw that there were literally thousands of options. Is there a public program with more options?
You can shove all those options into a file and instruct the JVM to load them up using `@`.
java @all-options.txt -jar my.jar
This is why lots of engineers waste time fiddling with options to tune the JVM and still require hundreds of replicated micro-services to "scale" their backends and losing money on AWS and when they will never admit the issue is the technology they have chosen (Java) and why AWS loves their customers using inefficient and expensive technologies.
Even after that, both Go and Rust continue to run rings around the JVM no matter the combination of options.
Go's GC is absolutely awful and leads to nondeterministic pauses and catastrophic latency spikes, especially when the memory pressure and capacity is high. Throw the go GC against a 256GB heap, see how well it survives.
Technologies have strong and weak points. Go's strong points are small, targeted pieces of software and having 66% of a binary basically be if err != nil return err. Rust's strong points are that you get to have the symbol<():soup<_, |_| of { c++ }>> while not saying you're writing c++ and feeling really smug when you say that you only needed to use 5 Arc<Mutex<T>> and rewrote your entire software three times but at least it runs almost as fast as some shitty C that does fgets() in the middle of a hot loop. Java lets you spawn spring boot and instantiate a string through reflection because why not.
I promise you, I can write allocation heavy FizzBuzzEnterpriseFactoryFactories in Rust too.
Only tuning you should be doing is setting the heap size and algorithm (Though, size is likely enough).
> Like it hogs some memory at start, crashes if you go above a certain amount, and doesn't return memory to the OS when GC'd. Even Python and JS don't have those problems.
Unlike Python and I believe most javascript engines, the JVM uses moving garbage collectors. That's the primary reason why it hogs memory.
In these ready to return to OS languages, when something is freed or allocated they are literally calling "malloc" and "free" directly. That's why stuff tends to return back to the OS faster.
The JVM doesn't do that. When a GC runs in the JVM, the JVM picks up and moves live data to a new location. That means the JVM needs a minimum amount of free space to operate. The benefit of this is the JVM can allocate really fast, it's just a single pointer bump and a check to ensure there's enough space. It's pretty close to the same performance as the stack is in C++.
And if there's a lot of data that lives for a short period of time, the JVM frees that data very fast as well. There is little accounting that the JVM has to do to free stuff up because it's simply moving the live data.
For even the fastest allocators that python/javascript engines use, this isn't true. They have to keep track of the various allocation locations and the gaps in allocation when something is freed. And a request for allocation needs to ultimately find a location in the heap with enough room.
Java does have a memory issue, though, all objects in java are pretty bulky. This will hopefully be fixed in future versions when "value" types are added.
But eventually someone gonna write the goddamn whole of AWS or Alibaba in the language where you have machines with TBs of heaps (yeah, you read that right), where most other managed languages would just give up instantly - and then you may have to add 2-3 parameters to make it actually run properly in these extreme conditions.
Java has all these knobs, because the ultimate goal is not needed to rewrite, rather fine tuning, just like when you look at the endless command line options for GCC, clang, MSVC,...
It is also a matter of implementation, Android is Java (kind of), and you also don't get push knobs unless you are a developer talking directly to a single device over ADB.
Recently I had a python friend use the most balls to the wall python backend, he couldnt beleive java was faster, but the numbers werent lying. We did 1 billion iterations of adding a float, took a few seconds in java.
Development velocity is way greater in Java.