IBM's Eclipse OpenJ9 Is A Promising Open-Source JVM

For those that missed the news over the weekend, IBM has open-sourced its in-house JVM and contributed it to the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse OpenJ9 is this new, full-featured, enterprise-ready open-source Java Virtual Machine.

OpenJ9 is a new alternative to the Hotspot JVM currently used within OpenJDK. OpenJ9 is said to be more featureful and production-ready and comes with the full backing of IBM.

"The long term goal of the Eclipse OpenJ9 project is to foster an open ecosystem of JVM developers that can collaborate and innovate with designers and developers of hardware platforms, operating systems, tools, and frameworks. The project welcomes collaboration, embraces fresh innovation, and extends an opportunity to influence the development of OpenJ9 for the next generation of Java applications," explains the OpenJ9 GitHub.

As of this weekend there are now prebuilt binaries available with OpenJDK 9 using the OpenJ9 JVM.

It sounds like we may end up seeing better performance too out of OpenJ9 over Hotspot, so I may end up trying it on some benchmarks. More details on the new project at Eclipse.org.