How is this different to system tuning parameters in Linux /proc, FreeBsd, Windows Registry, Firefox about:config, sockopt, ioctl, postgres?

Zillions of options. Some important, some not

One of my nerd-quizzes I hade at interviews before was "what letters in what case are NOT flags to GNU ls".

Just because you have more features and way to use them. Say I like to use a different garbage collector for a tool.

I don't think modernity is a noteworthy factor as to whether tooling is opinionated.

In what way is gofmt remotely comparable to a JVM?

In reality the number of options is significantly smaller than the 1843 you mentioned. The list contains boatloads of duplicates because they exist for multiple architectures. E.g. BackgroundCompilation is present on 8 lines on the OpenJDK 25 page: aarch64, arm, ppc, riscv, s390, x86 and twice more without an architecture.

It's a result of Java being required to run on many different OS environments (Oracle, Redhat, Windows, RISC/ARM/x86), along with user constraints and also business requirements.

In a way you can use this list of JVM options to illustrate how successful Java has become, that everyone needs an option to get it to work how they like it.

As a Java dev, I have maybe used about 10-15 of them in my career.

The weirdest/funnest one I used was for an old Sun Microsystems Solaris server which ran iPlanet, for a Java EE service.

Since this shared resources with some other back of office systems, it was prone to run out of memory.

Luckily there was a JVM option to handle this!

-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="<run command>"

It wasn't too important so we just used to trigger it to restart the whole machine, and it would come back to life. Sometimes we used to mess about and get it to send funny IRC messages like "Immah eaten all your bytez I ded now, please reboot me"

    -Djdk.virtualThreadScheduler.parallelism
    -Djdk.virtualThreadScheduler.maxPoolSize
    -Djava.util.concurrent.ForkJoinPool.common.parallelism

> You could never even consider all of the possible combinations and interactions, let alone test them.

Nobody has ever tested all possible inputs to 64 bit multiplication either. You can sample from the space.

As a sysadmin, not developer, I hate Java almost as much as Windows. The error messages Java apps produce are like coded messages that you have to decipher.

I.E. Instead of "<DOMAIN> TLS Handshake failed" it will be something like "ERROR: PKIX failed". So now I have to figure out that PKIX is referring to PKI and it would make too much sense to provide the domain that failed. Instead I have to play the guessing game.

These are all the options that have ever existed, including options that are or were available only in debug builds used during development and diagnostic options. There are still a few hundred or so non-diagnostic "product" flags at any one time, but most are intentionally undocumented (the list is compiled from the source code [1]) and are similar in spirit to compiler/linker configuration flags (only in Java, compilation and linking are done at runtime) and they're mostly concerned with various resource constants. It is very rare for most of them to ever be set manually, but if there's some unusual environment or condition, they can be helpful.

[1]: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/hotspot/share...

In the age of LLMs coupled with open source software, option count is unlimited. I fork FOSS projects and modify them for my own use all the time. Sometimes, with an agent, doing so is even easier than finding the "right" knob.

He probably knows, since he is one of the authors.