Compiling Spring Applications to GraalVM Native Images

Question

The GraalVM system apparently cannot compile a Spring application into a native image.

Can we compile a subset of the Spring application -- say, as a separate library -- and then use that with the remainder compiled using the usual javac compiler?

Or maybe if we leave out some Spring features from our application?

Any other possibilities?

Answer 1

A probably more up-to-date answer to this question is provided by the release of Spring Native beta that we (the Spring team) have just announced with a very detailed blog post and a video.

It allows you to compile Spring applications to a native executable with GraalVM native-image compiler via Spring Boot mvn spring-boot:build-image or gradle bootBuildImage commands, or by just leverage a local native-image installation via the native-image-maven-plugin.

The most useful links to use it are start.spring.io which now provides Spring Native support and the getting started section of the reference documentation .

Make sure to configure properly the Spring AOT Maven and Gradle plugins that are mandatory to get proper native support for your Spring application.

Enjoy!