Building native images

In this section, we will build a native image, using the Graal Native Image builder (native-image). Let's start by installing the Native Image builder.

native-image can be installed using GraalVM Updater with the following command:

gu install native-image

The tool is directly installed in the /bin folder of GRAALVM_HOME.

Let's now create a native image of FibonacciCalculator, from the Graal compiler configurations section in Chapter 4, Graal Just-In-Time Compiler.

To create a native image, compile the Java file and run native-image FibonacciCalculator –no-fallback -noserver. The following screenshot shows the output after running the command:

Figure 5.1 – FibonacciCalculator – generating a Native Image console output

Native Image compilation takes time, as it has to perform a lot of static code analysis to optimize the image that is generated. The following diagram shows the flow of ahead...