GraalVM CE 22.1 Released With Performance Improvements, Apple Silicon Support

Oracle this morning published the GraalVM Community Edition 22.1 feature release for this high-performance Java/JDK distribution that also provides runtimes for JavaScript, Python, and other languages.

GraalVM 22.1 is the new feature release for this high performance JDK/Java and other JVM language distribution environment. Oracle also published bug fix point releases today with GraalVM CE 21.3.2 and 20.3.6.

GraalVM 22.1 has many notable improvements for this feature update beyond just Java/JDK changes.

GraalVM 22.1 has many improvements that built up over the past several months including:

- Support for Arm-based Apple Silicon is now available with GraalVM via the darwin-aarch64 target. This Apple Silicon support is currently considered experimental.

- Code size improvements to help reduce the size of native executables. There should also be performance improvements and memory footprint reductions for the native-image generator.

- GraalVM's JavaScript support has implemented proposals for Intl.NumberFormat v3, Array Grouping, Temporal, and other features.

- GraalVM's Ruby language support has implemented the Ruby 3 keyword arguments semantics, reduced the memory footprint for C extensions, and other improvements.

- GraalVM's Python language support now can handle module freezing that leads to Python REPL starts 30% faster and with 40% less memory.

- The LLVM runtime support within GraalVM added support for C/C++ thread local storage, new interop APIs, and other improvements.

- Java on Truffle has implemented explicit reference processing in single-threaded mode so it's usable in more situations to prevent leaking resources.

GraalVM Community Edition downloads via GitHub. More details on the GraalVM 22.1 changes via GraalVM.org.