lucene-grep VS BlockHound

- Graal native images are real. These boast a far lower startup overhead and much lower steady state memory usage for simpler applications.

Probably my counterexample of choice is this: https://github.com/dainiusjocas/lucene-grep - it uses Lucene, probably the best search library (core of Elasticsearch, Solr, most websites), which is notoriously not simple code to implement grep-like functionality. In simple cases, they demonstrate a 30ms whole process runtime with no more than 32MB of RAM used (which looks suspiciously like a default).

The JVM is fast becoming a bit like Postgres... one of those 'second best at everything' pieces of tech.

Here goes: https://github.com/dainiusjocas/lucene-grep/issues/84

I realize some relatively obscure Finnish stemmer and Lucene with GraalVM aren't exactly a common use case. I did some testing and provided my use case. I certainly have much English language content to search with using lucene-grep. So, thank you for making it!

There is a great tool called Blockhound we can use to detect if/when we have a blocking call in our application. This way, we can ensure that we don't break the non-blocking nature of our application by mistake while developing new features. Setting it up is fairly straightforward.

There's even a test library to detect them: https://github.com/reactor/BlockHound

One of the talks in my current portfolio is Migrating from Imperative to Reactive. The talk is based on a demo migrating from Spring WebMVC to Spring WebFlux in a step-by-step approach. One of the steps involves installing BlockHound: it allows to check whether a blocking call occurs in a thread it shouldn't happen and throws an exception at runtime when it happens.

The first step is to make the application compatible with GraalVM. We need to remove Blockhound from the code. Blockhound allows verifying that no blocking code runs in unwanted places. It's a Java agent that requires a JDK, not a JRE. It's great for a demo, but it has nothing to do with a production application.