I've merged changes into master (to be 1.3 soon) that should make Nailgun easier to use. And 1.3 will be the first release to include all NG stuff in the binary dist.

• jruby --ng-server starts up a server. You can manage it however you like
• jruby --ng uses the Nailgun client instead of launching a new JVM for the command you run. You'll just need to run make in tool/nailgun to build the ng executable (already built for you on Windows).

Future improvements will include having --ng start up the server for you if you haven't started it, passing signals through (don't expect signals to work at all right now), better management of threads and commands, and so on. But it's a good start, and people can try to play with it and report issues more easily now.

Heres a sample session:

~/projects/jruby ➔ cd tool/nailgun/ ; make ; cd -
Building ng client.  To build a Windows binary, type 'make ng.exe'
gcc -Wall -pedantic -s -O3 -o ng src/c/ng.c
ld warning: option -s is obsolete and being ignored
/Users/headius/projects/jruby

~/projects/jruby ➔ jruby --ng-server
NGServer started on all interfaces, port 2113.
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 jruby --ng-server

~/projects/jruby ➔ bg
[1]+ jruby --ng-server &

~/projects/jruby ➔ jruby --ng -e "puts 1"
1

~/projects/jruby ➔ time jruby -e "puts 1"
1

real    0m0.609s
user    0m0.482s
sys    0m0.119s

~/projects/jruby ➔ time jruby --ng -e "puts 1"
1

real    0m0.073s
user    0m0.010s
sys    0m0.018s

Update: For those not familiar, "NailGun is a client, protocol, and server for running Java programs from the command line without incurring the JVM startup overhead. Programs run in the server (implemented in java), triggered by the client (written in C), which handles all I/O."

~/projects/jruby ➔ cd tool/nailgun/ ; ./configure ; make ; cd -