What are the difficulties encountered when trying to run a Spring Boot native application that includes Apache Camel using GraalVM and native-image?

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Reflection: GraalVM's native-image compiler creates a runtime image by statically analyzing the application's bytecode. Apache Camel heavily depends on dynamic class loading and reflection, which native-image does not support out-of-the-box.

Proxy Support: Apache Camel uses various protocols like HTTP, FTP, and SMTP for communication, where proxy support is crucial. GraalVM's native-image does not support JDK's proxy configuration by default.

Unsupported Libraries: Native-image compiler does not support some of the libraries, which Apache Camel depends on, like Javassist, which is used in Camel's bytecode manipulation.

Native Dependencies: GraalVM native-image depends on the target operating system, and the native libraries required by Apache Camel should be pre-installed, which can get quite demanding when deploying to different operating systems.

Limited Debugging Options: Debugging native images is more complicated than their JVM counterparts, which makes it difficult to identify issues when running Apache Camel's native-image.