There'd have to be a new implementation rewritten from scratch for native-image (the native-image GC is actually written in Java itself, while ZGC is written in

There'd have to be a new implementation rewritten from scratch for native-image (the native-image GC is actually written in Java itself, while ZGC is written in C++), but I don't see any reason why it would be impossible. Note that Oracle does have intentions to commercialize similar features; there's already a low latency GC for native-image apps, but it's inspired by G1, not ZGC, I believe, and only available in Graal Enterprise Edition. So any such ultra-low-latency GC might be in a similar basket, unless it was implemented by an outside party or something. Or Oracle changes course on this. If you don't use native-image and can use a normal JDK to host your Graal app (by using Graal as the JVMCI compiler), then you might be able to use ZGC today with that setup, assuming support for ZGC read barriers has been implemented in Graal. EDIT: apparently not yet :( https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/2149 https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/2149