Andreas Flakstad · Feb 20, 2026

From 308MB to 41MB: shrinking a GraalVM native image

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A short, practical recipe for getting smaller Clojure native binaries with GraalVM native-image . Prompted by ongoing work building Ro , a local-first work system with web, CLI and TUI interfaces. These are the biggest levers I found doing this work initially. There are many other config flags and approaches to take to bring this down further, and I will likely explore them more as the project…

A short, practical recipe for getting smaller Clojure native binaries with GraalVM native-image. Prompted by ongoing work building Ro, a local-first work system with web, CLI and TUI interfaces.

These are the biggest levers I found doing this work initially. There are many other config flags and approaches to take to bring this down further, and I will likely explore them more as the project matures.

Baseline observation building a native image of the project on macOS:

ls -lh ~/.local/bin/ro
# -rwxr-xr-x ... 308M ... ~/.local/bin/ro

Goal: reduce size without breaking runtime behavior.

Read on andreasflakstad.no ↗

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