GraalVM 20.2 Released With Compile Time Improvements, Better Error Reporting

Oracle engineers have released a new version of GraalVM, their Java virtual machine that supports JIT compilation, ahead-of-time compilation with GraalVM Native Image, an LLVM runtime, JavaScript runtime, and other language support like Python and R.

With GraalVM 20.2 released on Tuesday there is now support for releasing memory used by the GraalVM library (libgraal) back to the operating system when the application enters a stable phase and the compilation goes idle. GraalVM 20.2 also has improvements to the "excessive" compile time of some programs, and improved error reporting with libgraal.

GraalVM 20.2 also brings a number of improvements to its Native Image support, a number of new features implemented for its JavaScript runtime, LLVM runtime updates, various Python improvements/fixes, and updated Ruby support.

GraalVM 20.2 Enterprise also has some of its own improvements beyond making use of Oracle JDK rather than OpenJDK. This 20.2 Enterprise update has various additional optimizations, an experimental partial loop unrolling pass, and other enhancements.

More details on GraalVM 20.2 via the release notes. The open-source/community build for GraalVM 20.2 is available from GitHub.