Ask HN: Why is Java AOT compilation (using graalvm native-image) slow?

1 point

4 years ago

I followed the guide here https://quarkus.io/guides/building-native-image to set up a minimal quarkus webservice graalvm native image. Ran command 'time quarkus build --native' to compile the example. The compile time on my laptop was 2 minutes, 12 seconds, the resulting image size was 38Mb.

I then followed the guide here https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/web-service-gin to set up a minimal golang webservice native image. Ran 'time go build' to compile the executable. It took 1.006 seconds on my laptop and produced a 16Mb executable.

What is the underlying technical reason why graalvm native-image is so much slower to compile than golang build? From a high level it seems to me that they are both accomplishing more or less the same thing. Are there choices in the java language design itself that make it hard to compile AOT?