but the thing is in most cases you can use the jvm while in development and only use native-image once in a while to check it works

actually that would be the promise of java, write it once run it everywhere. afaik (and admittedly I don’t know much) graalvm is a bit behind in terms of language support, but if you compile down to what is supported it should not be a problem to develop on a different vm

latest supported version is 11 and yes, some features are not supported like security manager, etc. but that’s expected when you actually remove code from the platform