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The Philosophy of FastDaemon

Important

"Sub-Millisecond IPC. Deterministic Process Control. Zero Bloat."

FastDaemon is designed on the principle that local tooling, developer utilities, and background helper processes should start instantaneously, communicate without serialization overhead, and never leave zombie processes behind.

Core Tenets

1. Reject Heavy HTTP Stacks for Local Process Communication

When a CLI tool needs to talk to a background worker on localhost, spinning up embedded HTTP servers (Jetty, Tomcat, Netty) brings:

  • 10–50 MB of third-party JARs.
  • 500–2,500 ms cold startup delays.
  • Heavy JSON or REST parsing overhead.

FastDaemon uses direct loopback TCP with a lightweight delimiter protocol (CMD\tPAYLOAD\n), delivering round-trip latency under 300 µs with zero external libraries.

2. Deterministic Single-Instance Coordination

Background daemons frequently collide when multiple terminal sessions launch at once. FastDaemon utilizes OS-level kernel locks (FileChannel.tryLock()) combined with atomic PID files:

  • Multiple daemon instances cannot run simultaneously.
  • Stale lock files are cleanly reclaimed by the OS kernel upon process exit.
  • Client tools can immediately detect if a worker is alive with a fast non-blocking heartbeat probe.

3. Graceful Lifecycle & Clean Exit

A well-behaved background process must cleanly clean up after itself. FastDaemon provides:

  • Automatic JVM shutdown hook registration.
  • Built-in remote SHUTDOWN command.
  • Deterministic PID cleanup.

4. Zero Dependencies & Instant Startup

FastDaemon contains zero external dependencies and is built on pure Java APIs. It runs on JDK 17+ with instant cold-start performance.

🤖 FastDaemon — Powering background process execution in the FastJava Ecosystem.