[gunnarmorling]

As a practical example for a Java-based CLI tool in the wild, here's kcctl, a command line client for Kafka Connect: https://github.com/kcctl/kcctl/. It's a native binary (via GraalVM), starting up in a few ms, so that it actually be invoked during tab completions and do a round-trip to the Kafka Connect REST API without any noticeable delay whatsoever.

Installation is via brew, so same experience as for all the other CLI tools you're using. The binary size is on the higher end (52 MB), but I don't think this makes any relevant difference for practical purposes. Build times with GraalVM are still not ideal (though getting better). Cross compilation is another sore point, I'm managing it via platform-specific GitHub Action runners. From a user perspective, non of this matters, I'd bet most users don't know that kcctl is written in Java.