Introducing Maven‑mvnd: A Faster Maven Build Tool for Java Developers

Java developers often find Maven's compilation speed sluggish, yet switching to a new build tool can be difficult due to legacy constraints; Maven‑mvnd offers a faster Maven experience by embedding Maven and leveraging GraalVM for quicker startup and lower memory usage.

1. Introduction

Maven‑mvnd is derived from Apache Maven, inspired by Gradle and Takari, and can replace Maven without a separate installation because it bundles Maven internally.

It creates one or more daemon processes to handle build requests in parallel, and it runs on GraalVM instead of the traditional JVM, resulting in faster startup and reduced memory consumption.

According to the documentation, mvnd provides the following advantages over classic Maven:

The JVM used for the build does not need to restart for each build.

Plugin class loaders are cached across builds, so plugin JARs are read and parsed only once.

JIT‑generated native code is retained, reducing JIT compilation time; the optimized code is immediately available for subsequent builds, benefiting both Maven plugins and the JDK itself.

By default, mvnd uses multiple CPU cores for parallel module builds, calculated as Math.max(Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() - 1, 1) . If the source tree does not support parallel builds, the -T1 flag can force serial execution.

2. Installation

The official documentation provides detailed installation steps; the source repository is https://github.com/apache/maven-mvnd . The author installed mvnd via Homebrew on macOS M1, which works fine, but the Homebrew package (version 0.7.1) does not support JDK 8, only JDK 11 and newer.

Running mvnd with JDK 8 produces the following error:

~ % mvnd -v
Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/mvndaemon/mvnd/client/DefaultClient has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 55.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:757)
    ...

The issue stems from the binary being compiled with a newer JDK. A closed issue ( Different java versions for mvnd and maven #512 ) suggests setting JAVA_HOME to JDK 11 and adding the flag -Dmaven.compiler.release=8 when invoking mvnd:

mvnd -Dmaven.compiler.release=8 compile

This generates bytecode compatible with JDK 8. The author notes that even with newer mvnd versions, the problem may persist on some machines, and building from source is an alternative.

3. Usage

Using mvnd is identical to Maven; simply replace the mvn command with mvnd . In the author's tests, mvnd reduced build time to roughly half of that of traditional Maven.

4. Conclusion

The article covered mvnd's introduction, installation, usage, and encountered issues. While Gradle may still be faster, mvnd offers a compelling speed boost for developers who are tied to Maven due to legacy projects and established workflows.

References:

https://github.com/apache/maven-mvnd

https://github.com/apache/maven-mvnd/issues/512

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/TG_6vq0mgbej8F3Qvpb6Vw