Quarkus is Kubernetes native, and to accomplish that we’ve spent a lot of time working across a number of different areas, such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and various framework optimizations. And, there’s much more work still to be done. One area that has piqued the interest of the developer community is Quarkus’s comprehensive and seamless approach to generating an operating system specific (aka native) executable from your Java code, as you do with languages like C and C++, which we believe will typically be used at the end of the build-test-deploy cycle.
Although the native compilation is important, as we’ll discuss later, Quarkus works really well with vanilla OpenJDK Hotspot, thanks to the significant performance improvements we’ve made to the entire stack. The native executable aspect Quarkus offers is optional and, if you don’t want it or your applications don’t need it, then you can ignore it. In fact, even when you are using native images, Quarkus still relies heavily on OpenJDK. The well-received dev mode is able to deliver near-instantaneous change-test cycles all due to Hotspot’s rich dynamic code execution capabilities. Additionally, GraalVM internally uses OpenJDK’s class library and HotSpot to produce a native image.
Still, there’s the question: Why have native compilation at all if the other optimizations are so good? That’s the question we’ll look at more closely here.
Continue reading “Quarkus: Why compile to native?”
