Oracle Releases GraalVM 21.3 With Java 17 Support, Other Enhancements

Oracle has published its latest quarterly update to GraalVM, the open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other execution modes and programming languages from Python to R to Ruby.

Given last month's release of Java 17 / OpenJDK 17, GraalVM 21.3 has added Java 17 support. Plus there are many other improvements to its various language front-ends and other components. Some of the GraalVM 21.3 highlights include:

- Java 17 support with GraalVM builds based on Oracle Java 17 and OpenJDK 17. OpenJDK 11 also continues to be supported while OpenJDK 8 is no longer supported by GraalVM.

- New optimizations and other improvements for the Native Image support.

- GraalVM's JavaScript support has implemented the proposals around Error Cause and Import Assertions. The JavaScript code has also expanded on its WebAssembly completeness.

- The Ruby support now has TRegex enabled by default for much faster matching of regular expressions. The Ruby code also has fully integrated support for foreign object traits.

- More of the core Python language support has been intrinsified and optimized for faster start-up and smaller footprint. There is also now a binary-compatible back-end for HPy 0.0.3, support for the Python multiprocessing module, support for the ctypes module, and other additions.

- The LLVM Runtime has been re-based to LLVM toolchain version 12.0.1.

- Various compiler optimizations and other performance tuning limited to GraalVM Enterprise, including better SIMD vectorization out of sequential code.

Downloads and more details on the community edition of GraalVM 21.3 via GitHub.