Lest we start to malign the JVM as a whole, my Clojure test suite, which includes functional tests running headless browsers against a full app hitting real Postgres databases, runs end to end in 20s.
The spring tests are generally quicker then the equivalent python test, so ime - the jvm is mostly to blame.
How much time actually goes by after you click "run test" (or run the equivalent cli command) until the test finished running?
Any projects using the jvm I've ever worked on (none of which were clojure, admittedly) have always taken at least 10-15s until the pre-phases were finished and the actual test setup began
If I completely clear all cached packages maybe, but I never do that locally or in CI/CD, and that's true of Python too (but no doubting UV is faster than Maven). Clojure/JVM startup time is less than half a second, obviously that's still infinitely more than Python or a systems language but tolerable to me. First test runs after about 2s? And obviously day to day these things run instantly because they're already loaded in a REPL/IPython. Maybe unfair to compare an interpreted language to a compiled one: building an uberjar would add 10 seconds but I'd never do that during development, which is part of the selling point I guess. Either way, I don't think the JVM startup time is really a massive issue in 2025, and I feel like whatever ecosystem you're in, you can always attack these slow test suites and improve your quality of life.
