This is already happening with Kotlin driving people to use functions instead of annotations. E.g. the kofu project gets rid of most anootation driven configuration for Spring Boot; specifically with the aim to speed up startup and ultimately enable native compilation via Graal.

You can use annotations without reflections, you just need another build step, take a look at Micronaut [1], it really looks like Spring Boot but makes all annotation processing in compile time. Because of that it also supports GraalVM as first class

[1] http://micronaut.io/

Really, thanks for sharing this. I just perused the docs and its got me excited to get back into Java development again!

Thanks for sharing this, I’m new to Micronaut - it seems to solve a lot of problems inherent to Java.