Building a 22 Megabytes Microservice with Java, Javalin and GraalVM

Oracle’s GraalVM allows for ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation of JVM applications. This means, instead of running a JVM process to execute your application, the compiler builds a native binary. How does it work? On a very high level, a basic runtime (called SubstrateVM) is compiled into the binary, as well as the actual application. Sounds a little like Go, which also includes a small runtime for e.g. garbage collection. In this article, I’ll show how to build a small sample restful webservice with GraalVM native compilation. Read more