Closed-world assumption in Java

Building Native Image for a Java application requires configuration of reflection, proxies, and other dynamic Java mechanisms. But why is this necessary if the JVM handles all of this automatically? To answer that, we need to look at the differences between static and dynamic compilation in Java. Issue At PVS-Studio, we are currently designing new static analyzers for JavaScript/TypeScript and Go to complement our existing tools. The Java team was tasked with developing the first version of the JavaScript/TypeScript analyzer. To avoid distributing a JRE and to gain performance profit, we decided to build the JavaScript/TypeScript analyzer into Native Image , i.e., to turn the Java application into a native program. However, everything had its price, even performance. GraalVM immediately laid out its requirements: we had to explicitly specify in the configuration which classes would be accessed via reflection, which proxies would be created, which resources would be included in the bina