Oracle Ships GraalVM 1.0 To "Run Programs Faster Anywhere"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Ships GraalVM 1.0 To "Run Programs Faster Anywhere"

Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GraalVM-1.0-Released

[FireBurn]

Is this just a fork of LLVM?

[tildearrow]

Typos:

GraalVM aims to be a polyglot VM twith zero-overhead interoperability

GraalVM is also embedable and

[Michael]

Is this just a fork of LLVM?

Doesn't appear to be. In fact, the Graal code is GPL licensed.

[cthart]

Use it and get lumped with a lawsuit. No thanks. I'm getting to the point I refuse to use anything coming out of Redwood Shores.

[Michael_S]

Use it and get lumped with a lawsuit. No thanks. I'm getting to the point I refuse to use anything coming out of Redwood Shores.

I hate Oracle too, but the code is licensed GPLv2 and the project is pretty impressive.

One piece of it is that you can compile Java code to native binaries now. You can't use certain APIs like runtime class loading and runtime reflection (dynamic class inspection). And the compile time for Java to native is very slow. But the resulting code are small binaries that only include portions of the Java standard library actually used by the program and there is no JVM startup overhead. So finally, 'Hello World' in Java will run exactly as fast as 'Hello World' in C. Of course if you use heap memory allocations the binary will still have a builtin copy of one of the JVM garbage collectors (I'm not sure which one).

Another piece is easier interoperability, so you can invoke Java more easily from Ruby on the JVM and vice versa, likewise for Javascript on the JVM, and in some demo projects they also had R running on it and cross-calling with Java and Ruby and so forth. And the speed was impressive, too.

[schmidtbag]

I'd rather just download more RAM.

[nomadewolf]

I'd rather just download more RAM.

Plz send the link.
I need moar RAM for por... internet research!

[discordian]

Of course if you use heap memory allocations the binary will still have a builtin copy of one of the JVM garbage collectors (I'm not sure which one).

How can you not use the heap in Java?

[jacob]

I hate Oracle too, but the code is licensed GPLv2 and the project is pretty impressive.

One piece of it is that you can compile Java code to native binaries now. You can't use certain APIs like runtime class loading and runtime reflection (dynamic class inspection). And the compile time for Java to native is very slow. But the resulting code are small binaries that only include portions of the Java standard library actually used by the program and there is no JVM startup overhead. So finally, 'Hello World' in Java will run exactly as fast as 'Hello World' in C. Of course if you use heap memory allocations the binary will still have a builtin copy of one of the JVM garbage collectors (I'm not sure which one).

Another piece is easier interoperability, so you can invoke Java more easily from Ruby on the JVM and vice versa, likewise for Javascript on the JVM, and in some demo projects they also had R running on it and cross-calling with Java and Ruby and so forth. And the speed was impressive, too.

Good on them for using the GPLv2 but otherwise I say wait and see. I know nothing about the project but judging by the announcement, this sounds actually like some pretty terrible piece of bloatware/hypeware. Software that promises to be all things to everyone has never ever turned out to be any good so far.