[spockz]

GraalVM’s native image has been a thing for a while now. This could overcome the daemon issue partially. The daemon does more ofc by as it keeps some state in memory. But at least the binary start time is a solved problem in Java land.

[sunshowers]

Why does Bazel not ship a native image by default?

[spockz]

I do not know. I could only find GitHub issues and feature sound offering integration with graalvm for building native apps with Bazel.