Publish a native executable

[bioball]

The LSP should be published as a native executable, so that users do not need to install Java 22+ on their system.

This is currently blocked by oracle/graal#8113

[jclsn]

I would go one step further and seriously question the choice of Java for the LSP.

[udf2457]

Yeah @jclsn, what's going on in Java land is horrible. Yes, I know there are forks, but then you've got the whole question of compatibility.

Not defending it (and I don't work for Apple) but IIRC a lot of Apple's backend stuff was historically written in Java and I guess a lot of it remains in place. Looking at the Apple Jobs website, there are currently 558 results worldwide for "Java" so they're still recruting new expertise in that area.

Most disappointing is they've got a current job opening for "Senior Software Engineer – Language Design & Open Source Tools (Pkl Team)" which is basically looking for Java coder.

[jclsn]

They should write it in pkl and generate Go code! Would be an epic POC xD

[bioball]

Pkl is implemented in Java, but it's not actually tied to Java. Eventually, we'd like to have multiple implementations. However, even today, you don't need the JVM in order to use the Pkl CLI, because it's available as a native executable. Later this year, we'll also look to publish pkl-lsp as a native executable too, which will eliminate the Java requirement here.

Also: please be mindful to be respectful; you're certainly allowed to have your own opinions on Java, but this isn't really the correct forum for it.

[jclsn]

@bioball My problem with Java is mainly the need for the JVM. I actually did not know you could create native executables from it. Looking forward to it then!

[StayBlue]

The GraalVM issue cited here has been closed.

[disrupted]

any news on this? the lack of a portable executable makes adoption more difficult than it should be

[albuquerq]

Any news here?

[dhm116]

Using GraalVM 25.0.2, I was (seemingly) able to produce a native binary (on MacOS) via the following steps:

1. Generate the reachability-metadata.json for a pkl-lsp-<version>.jar release:

   mkdir -p META-INF/native-image
   java -agentlib:native-image-agent=config-output-dir=META-INF/native-image -jar pkl-lsp-0.6.0.jar

   This runs the language server, so I had to ctrl+c to exit it.
2. Update the pkl-lsp-<version>.jar to include the generated metadata file:

   jar --file pkl-lsp-0.6.0.jar -u META-INF/native-image/reachability-metadata.json

   You can verify that the file was added to the jar via:

   jar --file ./pkl-lsp-0.6.0.jar -t | grep "META-INF/native-image/reachability-metadata.json"

3. Build the native image:

   native-image -march=native -jar pkl-lsp-0.6.0.jar

   You should now have a pkl-lsp-<version> native binary in the current directory 👍

[mraesener-aubex]

just a quick comment from my side - since Java has (for a reason?) a really bad reputation nowadays, getting rid of the hard dependency having Java installed on your machine (I give Pkl a try especially because of LSP features and tooling) might be a boost in Pkl adoption in general. just my 5 cents and greetings.

[udf2457]

Ironically Apple stopped shipping Java on macOS as of OS X 10.7 (Lion), and deprecated it from OS X 10.6 Update 3.

So Mac users have not had a JRE out-of-the-box since 2011.

I therefore agree with @mraesener-aubex , its weird to require people to install a JRE just to use pkl.

I absolutely agree that such a prerequisite will adversely affect community adoption.

It is very unfortunate that Apple did not code this in go or rust which can ship binaries.

[colelawrence]

I was able to make a published version of this via github actions that I just tested via mise use -g github:colelawrence/pkl-lsp on macos-arm64

https://github.com/colelawrence/pkl-lsp/releases/tag/0.6.0-native.20260518.5