A walkthrough of building a native macOS binary for Apache Kafka using GraalVM's native-image tool. Starting from installing GraalVM via SDKMan, building Kafka from source, and using the existing native-image configuration files from the Kafka source tree (introduced in KIP-974), the result is a self-contained AArch64 binary. Interestingly, the native binary on macOS starts in ~220ms compared to ~120ms when run via Docker on macOS, though the total Docker startup time (~340ms) still makes the native binary the fastest overall path to a running Kafka broker.
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