sbt-native-packager vs sbt-native-image

sbt-native-packager

sbt Native Packager (by sbt)

#Sbt plugins #SBT #Scala #native-packages #sbt-docker #sbt-plugin #Docker #Rpm #Deb

Source Code

sbt-native-packager.readthedocs.io

sbt-native-image

Plugin to generate native-image binaries with sbt (by scalameta)

#native-image #SBT #Scala #graalvm-native-image #Graalvm #github-actions

Source Code

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sbt-native-packager		sbt-native-image
	Project
3	Mentions	5
1,557	Stars	223
0.1%	Growth	1.3%
4.2	Activity	0.0
28 days ago	Latest Commit	19 days ago
Scala	Language	Scala
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License	License	-

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

sbt-native-packager

Posts with mentions or reviews of sbt-native-packager. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-25.

I removed sbt-assembly and sbt-buildinfo from my project.
2 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 25 Nov 2022

You should use sbt-jib. (You shouldn't use sbt-native-packager either, it doesn't work well in this regard: [1], [2].)
SBT error when running package application: java.lang.RuntimeException: No main class detected.
3 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 9 Jun 2021

IMO don't take any of this advice and use https://github.com/sbt/sbt-native-packager

sbt-native-image

Posts with mentions or reviews of sbt-native-image. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-09-13.

Scala.js AWS Lambda, using Scala 3
6 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 13 Sep 2022

Take a look at sbt-native-image or sbt-native-packager for building the native image.
GraalVM native-image with Scala 3 reflection hell
3 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 9 Jan 2022

The reason seems to be Scala 3's new encoding for lazy vals, where a reflective access to a variable called bitmap takes place. To demonstrate this, I took the http4s g8 template, set it up with Scala 3.1.0, added sbt native-image, started the nativeImageRunAgent and ran a single request against GET /joke. After stopping the server, the native-image run agent generated the reflective configs that are required for this path of execution. Comparing the generated Scala 2.13 with the Scala 3 configs, yields a bloated version for Scala 3 that contains these additional rules:
Is Scala and Play Framework dying?
5 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 8 Dec 2021

Sbt plugin: https://github.com/scalameta/sbt-native-image
Native Image Compilation for A Purely Functional Example Application
2 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 15 Aug 2021

IIRC, the sbt-native-image plugin can abstract that away, too: https://github.com/scalameta/sbt-native-image#nativeimagerunagent https://github.com/scalameta/sbt-native-image
SBT error when running package application: java.lang.RuntimeException: No main class detected.
3 projects | reddit.com/r/scala | 9 Jun 2021

Assembly, however, has some disadvantages so you may also want to look into other alternatives like sbt-native-packager. You may even want to produce a binary using sbt-native-image (which uses GraalVM under the hood) so your users do not need to install anything at all, not even a JRE.