How does Micronaut support GraalVM native image compilation?

Micronaut was designed with GraalVM native image in mind from early on, which matters because native-image's static analysis struggles with unconstrained reflection, dynamic proxies, and classpath scanning, exactly the things Micronaut avoids by generating DI and AOP metadata at compile time.

Because bean wiring, AOP proxies, and configuration binding are all ordinary generated bytecode rather than reflective calls, GraalVM's native-image tool can trace through them the same way it traces normal code, without needing extensive manual reflection configuration files that many other frameworks require.

Micronaut also ships build plugins for Gradle and Maven that wire up the GraalVM native-image build step directly, along with reachability metadata for its own modules and common libraries, and a dedicated Micronaut AOT optimization pass that further reduces startup work specifically for native binaries.

The result is native executables that typically start in single-digit milliseconds and use a fraction of the memory of the equivalent JVM process, which is why Micronaut is a common choice for AWS Lambda and other serverless targets.