What is Spring Native?

Spring Native is an experimental project by the Spring team that aims to improve the performance and reduce the memory footprint of Spring applications by using native images. Native images are compiled binaries that are optimized for a specific platform, resulting in faster startup times and reduced memory usage.

Spring Native uses GraalVM, a high-performance virtual machine that can compile Java applications to native images. This means that Spring applications can be compiled ahead-of-time to native images, resulting in faster startup times and lower memory usage compared to traditional JVM-based applications.

Spring Native provides a number of features to help developers build and deploy native applications with Spring. These include:

Automatic configuration for native images: Spring Native includes support for automatically configuring the native image build process for Spring applications. This can save developers a significant amount of time and effort compared to manually configuring the native image build process.
Runtime optimizations: Spring Native includes optimizations that are specific to native images, such as reducing the number of loaded classes and reducing the memory footprint of the application.
Integration with Spring Boot: Spring Native is built on top of Spring Boot, which means that it can leverage many of the features and benefits of Spring Boot, such as auto-configuration and dependency management.
Fast startup times: One of the main benefits of Spring Native is that it can significantly reduce startup times for Spring applications. This can be particularly beneficial for applications that need to start quickly, such as serverless functions or containerized applications.

It’s worth noting that Spring Native is still an experimental project and may not be suitable for all applications. However, for applications that can benefit from faster startup times and lower memory usage, Spring Native can be a powerful tool to improve the performance and efficiency of Spring applications.