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GraalVM is a hugely under-appreciated piece of technology. A lot of my initial interest came from being able to blend different languages into a single runtime via the polyglot APIs, but the combination of performance, strong sandboxing support, and multi-language support has helped it emerge as a key primitive for anyone wishing to build extensible platforms without sacrificing speed, security, or developer ergonomics.
It's fascinating technology, but in my opinion too little, too late.
Compiling with GraalVM is still a pain and will not work out-of-the-box without modifications for any non-trivial project. This is mostly, I believe, not GraalVM's fault, because it can only do so much within the confines of the existing ecosystem.
If only AoT compilation to native code would have been taken seriously from the start, if only gcj would have gotten more attention, we could have ended up with an ecosystem that is somewhat amenable to what GraalVM tries to do.
As much as I like GraalVM and wish it success, my prediction is that in a few years it will be in the same state gcj has been quite some years now.
gcj had a lot of problems beyond needing configuration of reflection metadata. It used a full reimplementation of the standard library, and it was never adopted by the wider Java community being largely just Red Hat's strategy for creating a fully open source Java implementation rather than something offering specific benefits to Java developers. In particular people thought it'd lead to faster code, but GCC was never designed for Java and the results were actually a fair bit slower iirc.
Native image is quite different. With this new release the compiled images can not only be faster than JIT compiled Java (wow) but also use way less memory and start instantly. At a stroke this is resolving one of the biggest complaints people have always had against JVM languages.
And as a consequence you're seeing adoption by the wider community. All the modern Java web frameworks support it now, and there's a metadata repository where it's collected for projects that haven't accepted it upstream yet [1].
I think the reality is that faster startup, smaller deployments, and lower memory usage is considered much more valuable today than it was when GCJ was an actively maintained project. It simply did not offer things people needed at that time. But now, the tradeoffs are different, and so the effort of going back and modifying existing code to support AOT compilation has a greater overall payoff than it did in the past, which is why people are pursuing it. It's the same reason .NET is adding full AOT support - because people want it now, and they want it now more than they did before.
I worked on gcj (and GNU Classpath) for a number of years. gcj's origins are in the embedded systems space, where our customers valued the small memory footprint and portability across processor architectures that were unlikely to get performant JITs. As we eased out of the embedded space, it was clear that jumping on the OpenJDK train was the right choice for Free Software-minded gcj/Classpath devs, as Sun adopted the GPL and GNU Classpath exception license. gcj was unlikely to ever catch up, and many of us were motivated by the idea of a Free Software Java solution, which Sun just handed to us.
> [...] my prediction is that in a few years it will be in the same state gcj has been quite some years now.
You make it sound like GraalVM is just for ahead-of-time compiling like gcj, but there's more to it than native image. It's possible GraalVM will be openjdk's jit compiler, for example.
> my prediction is that in a few years it will be in the same state gcj has been quite some years now
I'll take that bet.
GraalVM has only gotten more and more popular.
There are a lot of situations (large server applications) that don't benefit much from AOT.
But others do. Android is (partially) AOT.
Were talking enterprise java, it's a behamouth and changing it takes forever.
I think in today's ecosystem of microservices and serverless etc, AOT will be taken pretty seriously.
We use Graal to sandbox a scripting language based on EcmaScript 6 for our app.
It’s great.
The NodeJS performance is really bad for many use cases, such as anything you do to build a web app. It has a long way to go in terms of becoming practical.
https://www.graalvm.org/latest/security-guide/polyglot-sandb... looks very interesting though enterprise (not open source I assume?) only and maybe only for executing javascript? Or do I misunderstand, or is there other sandboxing support?
I've only done one project with GraalVM and I've been pretty happy with it in regards to faster startup time.
I was doing stuff in Clojure. Clojure is a great language but it tends to have very slow startup times, even by JVM standards (it's not weird for a large Clojure program to take 5-6 seconds to start. Even a "hello world" can take upwards of a second or two). Graal mostly Just Worked with the standalone uberjar produced by Leiningen and created an executable that started in about 3 milliseconds. It was amazing.
While the lack of proper reflection support was a little annoying, it actually wasn't as horrible with Clojure as you might think; most problems were fixed with basic type hinting, and all but one Clojure library I used (http-kit) worked flawlessly.
The recurring problem I've seen that would cause slow startup is cramming many (require) and (import) in the project core.clj file - for non-clojure devs here, this means including a lot of dependencies in the file called on the startup.
By reordering things to be loaded smartly or lazily, startup speed can be improved a lot.
Another reason for a slow startup is that Clojure must load its own runtime every time. The current compiler is not a tree shaker, nor can it rewrite complex expressions in compile-time, although many clojure.core functions were rewritten over time to accommodate JVM optimizers. However, Graal is here precisely to do at the bytecode level, as long as you take care of all type hint warnings and avoid things Graal can't see during compilation (e.g. deferring evaluation of some expressions for runtime).
What are the applications where slow startup time is such a big issue?
Without getting too involved with details (I was working for a certain company that doesn't like people talking in detail about anything I did there), I had a program that routinely started other processes. I was required to use Java or Clojure, and we had a sort of quasi-RPC thing that would spawn process on the shell, get a result, and return that result as a string. This application wasn't super performance-oriented, but it was enough to where a 5 second start time was untenable.
Commandline tools?
Serverless apps possibly.
We tried to use it to improve AWS lambda startup times but desisted as it was a pain to use it with an existing app.
It required too many tweaks as there are waay too many things that rely on reflection :(
Things that broke include: JSON (de)serialization using Jackson, validations using hibernate, validator, AWS SDK, and even simpler libs like picocli...
It could be quite useful for a set of simpler apps though
Yes, Jackson really was a bummer. To this day I can't understand how a project like Springboot advertises Graalvm readiness when Jackson is not supported without tweaks. What do the Springboot devs think we are using Springboot for, Hello World blog posts?
Picocli allows using a compiler annotation processor to generate classes at compile time instead [0].
[0]: https://github.com/remkop/picocli/blob/main/picocli-codegen/...
this was our experience as well. Both with GraalVM/Quarkus and .NET CrossGen/Native/CoreRT. It's almost a different platform that's far less supported and less stable. Even if you put in the work to make things work, they'll eventually break. Quarkus tries to give a full experience like Kotlin Native, but both are also not really there.
It's really unfortunate how Java and C# are perceived as slow because of their painful startup time.
GraalVM has an agent you can use to run your project. It then generates the dependency file for you and you can then use that file to compile the native code.
If you use a framework like Spring Boot then you don't even need that. Just upgrade to 3+ and Jackson, Hibernate (and maybe these other APIs) should pretty much work out of the box.
Look at the Quarkus framework. It's designed with Graalvm native in mind, so it knows how to handle Jackson, AWS, etc. and compile them to a native binary. I'm using it in production with a native-compiled Lambda that calls other AWS services. It works GREAT!
ye even less relevant for that usecase with snapstart.
From 5 years ago, but still fascinating: Ten Things You Can Do With GraalVM by Chris Seaton
https://gist.github.com/chrisseaton/535e0e80ea19803d5529c623...
Seems like every time I try to use Graal - there's some dependency in my project that doesn't like it.
The linked sibling post on "New Truffle and GraalVM Languages release" feels rather exciting too https://medium.com/graalvm/new-truffle-and-graalvm-languages...
Specifically:
> GraalVM language runtimes (for JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java on Truffle, WebAssembly, and LLVM) can now be [...] installed as Maven/Gradle dependencies [...] which will work for GraalVM JDK and any other compatible JDK
Polyglot experimentation just got a whole lot easier! Kudos to everyone involved in pushing the JVM ecosystem forwards.
I just wish the compile times weren't so painfully slow. It makes it really difficult to work with.
You can generally develop with the JDK, and only compile from time to time.
What’s the latest on Truffle/Ruby supporting Rails?
Wouldn’t this provide massive gains for the Rails ecosystem once delivered?
(And with the GraalVM licenses changes to be more favorable/permission, I have to imagine there would be significant adoption)
TruffleRuby runs Rails and is compatible with many gems, including C extensions. TruffleRuby is not 100% compatible with MRI 3.2 yet. Please report any compatibility issues you might find. TruffleRuby passes around 97% of ruby/spec, more than any other alternative Ruby implementation.
GitHub page has some info: https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby#current-status
My question is, how viable is TruffleRuby vs JRuby?
I am more interested in this proposal
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8313278
It is "Ahead of Time Compilation for the Java Virtual Machine". The proposal details of using AOT code at startup and then JIT taking over. So you get best of both worlds with fast application launch and then throughput once things are warmed up.
Graal is cool, but it will not be as throughput performant compared to JIT. Only for fast startup, serverless or low memory environments.
Not sure if you are aware of it, but Graal is also a JVMCI-comparible JIT compiler.
Also, there was a proposal (not yet JEP though) on condensers and that model could also make great use of GraalVM.
The linked post shows the AoT compiler ahead of the JIT one, it seems like PGO really closes the gap :)
Congrats to the GraalVM team on all their hard work
I think the biggest improvement in GraalVM 21 is profile-guided optimizations (PGO) in both aarch64 and amd64.
This means you can take full advantage of ARM cloud services like AWS Graviton (sp?) services for lower cost.
Also, looks like the Java Vector API (JEP338) has been optimized.
So, same code on your Raspberry Pi and AWS Graviton, cool.
Lots of comments about issues with dependencies and Graal. I suggest looking into Quarkus. Have had great success with and mandrel (a patched version of Graal for Quarkus). Quarkus focuses on creating Web APIs so wont cover it all but if thats what you want to do its great and builds native images quite easily.
I've slowly been keeping myself updated regarding GraalVM, I think Oracle is on to something here.
I use Graal Native to AOT compile my JavaFX applications. It works surprisingly well.
I was considering this, working on a new javafx app for a side project. Using java 17, and generating binaries with fxlauncher/jpackage/wix is not working great imo. Any good recommendations on tooling for using the graal route? I develop on linux but most users will be on windows. It would be great to not have to use windows vm for building the binaries (but i can if needed ofcourse).
it’s time to do a barrel roll
why on earth was this downvoted. im excited for them
Warning: Graal is owned by a law-firm called Oracle (that happens to employ some programmers too).
Who is actually at risk of falling victim to Oracle's infamous licensing shakedowns, though? And how bad are they actually?
they opened up the license...