Oracle's GraalVM 22.2 Brings More Performance Optimizations

Oracle has issued its newest quarterly release of GraalVM as its high performance Java JVM/JDK that also supports additional execution models and programming languages. GraalVM 22.2 is this newest version and contains a number of different optimizations for its growing number of components.

GraalVM 22.2 is another big release both for the open-source "Community Edition" and Oracle's paid enterprise alternative. With GraalVM 22.2 some of the big changes include:

- GraalVM itself is much smaller for its base binary by decoupling the JavaScript, LLVM runtimes, and VisualVM being separated from the main package and now as separate install optional components. The GraalVM Community Linux build dropped from ~430MB to ~230MB.

- Improvements to Apple Silicon support namely for the enterprise edition.

- Improved RSS memory usage by GraalVM's Java JIT compiler.

- Various new optimizations added.

- Improved compatibility of GraalVM Native Images with third-party libraries. GraalVM Native Image also now supports Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), lowered the memory footprint for the native-image generator, and improved debugging support on Linux.

- The Polyglot runtime has seen updates to improve the interpreter-only performance for 20~30%.

- GraalVM has improved its JavaScript interoperability with Java.

- GraalVM's Ruby now supports OpenSSL 3.0, support for ARM 64-bit macOS, and other updates.

- GraalVM's Python has added an experimental bytecode interpreter for better performance and quicker start-ups.

- Significant performance improvements to GraalVM's WebAssembly support that the internal AST memory footprint sees a 3.18x improvement and peak performance improvements of 1.24x.

The GraalVM 22.2 Community Edition can be downloaded from GitHub with the many different binaries available for various platforms. More details on the project itself at GraalVM.org.