Native Alhena For Linux
2025-11-23
I was finally able to get Alhena compiled with GraalVM. This is the technology that won the "Java One Billion Row Challenge". If you don't know it, the winning submission was able to read and parse one billion records in less than two seconds. The contest proved so popular that other languages joined in on the fun. If you think Java is slow, you should check out the results.
This experimental version of Alhena launches in milliseconds and may be of interest to people that prioritize fast startup. Regular Java can be faster over time if you let the hotspot compiler do it's thing. Everything works except remote sync and possibly printing. (I removed the former and wasn't able to test the latter).
I'm making the binary available here. You need a glibc 2.28+ x64 Linux distro. It's not guaranteed to work on all systems. I tested on Ubuntu 24 and WSL. There's a readme.txt but the important thing is that you launch with the included alhena.sh script.
gemini://ultimatumlabs.com/alhena-native-4.5.6_linux_glibc_x64.tar.gz
Leave a note on the ultimatumlabs.com guestbook if you have anything to report. You can also find my email address there. If there's interest and it proves stable, I can start including it as part of the regular GitHub release cycle.