Oracle Releases GraalVM 22.0 With New Features

GraalVM 22.0 has been released for this Java VM/JDK that also supports other programming languages and run-times / execution modes. GraalVM continues to be performant and showing promising results not just for Java with JIT'ing but also ahead-of-time Java compilation to Native Image as well as for its Python implementation, WebAssembly run-time, and other targets.

GraalVM 22.0 is the newest quarterly release from Oracle. The free, open-source community edition of GraalVM 22.0 is available alongside its GraalVM Enterprise variant.

Some of the highlights for GraalVM 22.0 include:

- Java 8 support has been removed. GraalVM 22.0 is only targeting JDK 11 and JDK 17, with JDK 12/13/14/15/16 support also being removed.

- A new optimization to improve the performance in Native Image of a type switch. There are also Native Image updates to reduce the image size.

- Native Image has improved support for the Java Platform Module System.

- Various new Java compiler optimizations albeit limited to GraalVM Enterprise.

- ECMAScript 2022 features are now enabled by default for GraalVM's JavaScript support.

- GraalVM's LLVM Runtime has switched to the Truffle Fame API, has new optimizations, and other fixes.

- Various improvements to GraalVM's WebAssembly implementation.

More details on GraalVM 22.0 via GitHub. Oracle has also released GraalVM 21.3.1 and GraalVM 20.3.5.