Compiling Java into Native Binaries with Graal and Mill

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
  1. firebase-admin-java

    Firebase Admin Java SDK

    "Almost every Java program, library, and framework uses some degree of reflection and dynamic classloading, and so you do have to spend the effort to configure Graal appropriately." -- this is by far the biggest problem with native binary compilation.

    Imagine spending 15+ minutes building an exe, and it stopping at minute 15 because some things needed to be added in the config. Or, after waiting 30 minutes to have the exe ready, it refused to run because of the same problem.

    The issue is we don't know what we don't know. You don't "forget to include something" because you don't know what to include (and even after seeing the error, you still don't lol).

    I just wished all 3rd party libraries put their "include this config to include my lib in your exe", just like OSGi manifest (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/wasdtfe?topic=overview-osgi-bund...).

    For example, an issue still open for almost 2 years: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-admin-java/issues/800

  2. SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

    SaaSHub logo
  3. JNA

    Java Native Access

    https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/pull/1608

  4. Graal

    GraalVM compiles applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀

    Sorry, I know you weren't asking me, but for this same use case, yes, I've used a GHA build matrix with each OS/arch pair.

    Cosmo/APE support would fix this, and GraalVM already ships with a Musl libc implementation, so it isn't very far off.

    https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/8350

  5. Avalonia

    Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The future of .NET UI

    I don't know why anyone even uses the GUI frameworks from Microsoft these days. WinForms is only good if you need to throw something together quick. Everything else should be Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/). Cross platform and does support AOT.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts

  • How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries

    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 May 2024
  • Faster floating point math with Rust's new API

    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Aug 2026
  • Show HN: Rask – The .NET One Person Framework

    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Aug 2026
  • 🚨 OpenAI's AI Escaped and Hacked Another Company

    1 project | dev.to | 22 Jul 2026
  • Run Python in-process from .NET with CSnakes

    1 project | dev.to | 15 Jul 2026

Did you know that Java is
the 10th most popular programming language
based on number of references?