Oracle Releases GraalVM 20.1 Virtual Machine With Some Big Improvements

Oracle today released GraalVM 20.1 as their latest big feature update to this virtual machine implemented in Java that also supports not only JIT compilation but ahead-of-time compilation for Java software as well as supporting an LLVM runtime and other languages.

GraalVM 20.1 brings a host of updates including:

- "Significantly improved performance" for some benchmarks on JDK 11 due to synchronization fixes, helping some workloads as much as 50% better performance.

- Their Java mitigations for the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum is now only enabled for Intel CPUs needing the workaround and not all CPUs.

- For GraalVM's JavaScript support the ECMAScript 2020 features are now enabled by default. The NPM package runner (NPX) is also now part of GraalVM distributions.

- GraalVM Enterprise can now run C++ code in managed mode as part of GraalVM's LLVM runtime.

- Performance improvements for Python along with other language compatibility enhancements.

Downloads for GraalVM 20.1 Community Edition via GitHub. The long list of changes with GraalVM 20.1 can be found via GraalVM.org.