[GROOVY-6393] groovysh: suggest reducing startup time by loading commands from code

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.2.0-rc-1
• Fix Version/s: 2.3.0-beta-1
• Component/s: Groovysh
• Assignee: Jochen Theodorou
• Reporter: Thibault Kruse
• Created: 17/Oct/13 07:05
• Updated: 05/Apr/14 00:00
• Resolved: 13/Jan/14 10:10

Description

For undocumented reasons, groovysh uses an xml file to specify the commands to load into the shell, commands being "help", "history", etc. as presented here:
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Shell#GroovyShell-RecognizedCommands

The xml file just lists the fully qualified Classname, which is then used to create instances of the classes. This happens in

org/codehaus/groovy/tools/shell/util/XmlCommandRegistrar.groovy

which is invoked as default command registrar in

org/codehaus/groovy/tools/shell/Groovysh.groovy

I fail to see any practical benefit to this, either right now or in theory. However doing so delays groovysh startup. On my machine it feels like I can get a 500ms decrease on my 4s total groovysh startup time by loading the commands from the code.