GraalVM Updated For Java/JDK 21, Great Performance Results

In addition to Oracle releasing OpenJDK 21 / Java 21 on Tuesday, their GraalVM team also carried out a same-day release of GraalVM with the new Java 21 features and more.

GraalVM continues to evolve as a Java JVM/JDK based on the HotSpot virtual machine and supporting additional languages and execution models -- including ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation and other interesting extras. One of the main selling points for GraalVM boils down to:

"GraalVM is a high-performance JDK distribution that compiles your Java applications ahead of time into standalone binaries. These binaries start instantly, provide peak performance with no warmup, and use fewer resources. You can use GraalVM just like any other Java Development Kit in your IDE."

Released on GitHub is the updated community build of GraalVM built for JDK 21 with Linux / macOS / Windows binaries and both for x86_64 and AArch64 architectures.

More details on the new GraalVM changes can be found via their Medium.com blog. The GraalVM for JDK 21 release has continued improvements around AOT compilation, the G1 garbage collector now works on Linux AArch64, new optimization levels policy, a "-O3" optimization level is now honored for maximum optimizations with GraalVM, the --parallelism= option can be used for controlling how many threads are used by the build process, new experimental build options for Native Image handling, Control Flow Integrity (CFI) support for Native Image, and many other updates.