What is New in Grails 5

Grails 5 Overview

Grails 5 represented a significant architectural shift by building on top of the Micronaut Foundation. This brought substantial performance improvements while maintaining backward compatibility with most Grails 3 and 4 applications.

Performance Improvements

The most notable change is dramatically faster startup times and reduced memory consumption:

# Grails 4 startup: ~8 seconds
# Grails 5 startup: ~3 seconds
# Memory: reduced by approximately 40%

These improvements make Grails 5 much better suited for serverless and containerized deployments where cold starts matter.

GraalVM Native Image

Grails 5 provides first-class support for GraalVM native images, enabling near-instant startup times:

# Building a native image
gradlew nativeCompile

Gradle Improvements

Grails 5 upgraded to Gradle 7.x with improved build performance and better dependency management:

• Faster dependency resolution
• Improved incremental compilation
• Better IDE integration
• Configuration cache support

GORM Updates

GORM received performance optimizations and better support for reactive data access:

// Improved querying performance
Book.findAllByAuthor("Smith", [max: 10, offset: 0])

Key Points

• Grails 5 is built on Micronaut Foundation for better performance.
• Startup time reduced from ~8 seconds to ~3 seconds.
• First-class GraalVM native image support.
• Upgraded to Gradle 7.x with build improvements.
• GORM received performance and reactive data access updates.