Movies

Joker: Folie à Deux

1 year ago
2 min read

He's not alone anymore.

Instagram

SKG Games

1 year ago
<1 min read

Instagram

Snohomish Knitters Guild April Meeting: Games

Mastodon

Toots du Jour (Apr 8)

1 year ago
<1 min read
Movies

Fly to the Moon

1 year ago
3 min read

A sharp, stylish comedy-drama set against the high-stakes backdrop of NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Brought in to fix NASA’s public image, sparks fly in all directions as marketing maven Kelly Jones (Johansson) wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis’s (Tatum) already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up and the countdown truly begins…

Mastodon

Toots du Jour (Apr 7)

1 year ago
<1 min read
Java

GraalVM Native Image & bld

1 year ago
<1 min read

Someone asked us if bld could be used to generate native application with GraalVM. Our first reaction was, sure, you can create an extension to do just that. But after a bit of reflection, it dawned on me that it could easily be done using the bld-exec extension. The extension allows for executing applications from the command line.

The Maven plugin configuration given to us, as an example, looked something like:

<profile>
  <id>native-image</id>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.graalvm.nativeimage</groupId>
        <artifactId>native-image-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>21.2.0</version>
        <configuration>
          <imageName>ExampleApp</imageName>
          <mainClass>com.example.ExampleApp</mainClass>
          <buildArgs>
            <!-- Reduces the image size - Ensures the native image doesn't include the
            JVM as a fallback option -->
            <buildArg>--no-fallback</buildArg>
            <!-- Disables the use of the GraalVM compilation server -->
            <buildArg>--no-server</buildArg>
            <!-- Improve startup time - Initialize classes at build time rather than at
            runtime -->
            <buildArg>--initialize-at-build-time</buildArg>
            <!-- Include all files under /resources -->
          </buildArgs>
        </configuration>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <goals>
              <goal>native-image</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>package</phase>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</profile>

That's a handful at first glance. But once you understand how the native-image utility options work, it is pretty easy to convert:

@BuildCommand(value = "native-exec", summary = "Builds a native executable")
public void nativeExec() throws Exception {
  new ExecOperation()
    .fromProject(this)
    .timeout(120)
    .workDir(buildMainDirectory().getAbsolutePath())
    .command("native-image",
        "--no-fallback",
        "--no-server",
        "--initialize-at-build-time",
        "com.example.ExampleApp",
        new File(workDirectory(), "ExampleApp").getAbsolutePath())
    .execute();
}

Just use ./bld compile native-exec, and you're off to the races.

I've created a full example to demonstrate how to build a native executable using a class or JAR.

After converting over 60 projects, I'm still impressed with how flexible (yet, simple) bld truly is.

Mastodon

Toots du Jour (Apr 5)

1 year ago
<1 min read