Hello World app in SpringBoot compiled with GraalVM

Dependencies

• Important: Because of #1057 this tutorial is only runable on Linux machines. (native image agent is only available for Linux)
• Install GraalVM from here https://www.graalvm.org/ (Used version 20.0.0)
  • (For Mac OSX versions > Catalina: Remove quarantine from the bits, info)
    $ sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine path/to/graalvm/folder/
• Configure your env
  • Prepend the GraalVM bin directory to the PATH environment variable:
    $ export PATH=<path to GraalVM>/Contents/Home/bin:$PATH.
    To verify whether you are using GraalVM, run: $ which java
  • Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to resolve to the GraalVM installation directory:
    $ export JAVA_HOME=<path to GraalVM>/Contents/Home
  • (Specify GraalVM as the JRE or JDK installation in your Java IDE)

Version Information

• GraalVM 20.0.0 was the latest version available to download. Newer releases should have fix for Bug oracle/graal#2198
• SpringBoot 2.3.x was needed for GraalVM native-image support

Benchmark

The application is very simple (just giving out "Hello World" at localhost:8080 but nevertheless the performance difference is significant:

Spring Boot JVM	Spring Boot Native
Startup: Started GraalDemoApplication in 1.305 seconds (JVM running for 1.644)	Startup: Started GraalDemoApplication in 0.066 seconds (JVM running for 0.068)
RAM Usage: ca 502.9 MB	RAM Usage: ca 37 MB
Size: 16 MB	Size: 89 MB

Compile

The following steps are needed to compile the spring boot application to native code with GraalVm

mvn -DskipTests clean package
export MI=src/main/resources/META-INF
mkdir -p $MI 
java -agentlib:native-image-agent=config-output-dir=${MI}/native-image -jar target/<YOUR_APP_ARTIFACT>.jar

## Due to https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/2198 you have to add a class to reflect-config.json. Maybe its fixed in GraalVM version > 20.0.0
{
 "name":"org.apache.catalina.authenticator.jaspic.AuthConfigFactoryImpl",
 "allDeclaredConstructors":true,
 "allDeclaredMethods":true
},

## Check if the application is working correctly: http://localhost:8080
## then hit CTRL + C to stop the running application.

tree $MI
mvn -Pgraal clean package

Start the application

After successfully compiling the application you can start the application with ./target/de.wandi34.graaldemo.graaldemoapplication

Resources

Application was built with following documentations:

• https://spring.io/blog/2020/04/16/spring-tips-the-graalvm-native-image-builder-feature
• https://repo.spring.io/milestone/org/springframework/experimental/spring-graal-native-docs/0.6.0.RELEASE/spring-graal-native-docs-0.6.0.RELEASE.zip!/reference/index.html
• oracle/graal#2198