Oracle's GraalVM Native Image Now Defaults To x86-64-v3, IGV Open-Sourced

Oracle has published the latest community edition releases of GraalVM targeting JDK17 and JDK20. GraalVM also continues to support a variety of other languages beyond Java as well.

GraalVM continues on as a high performance Java JVM/JDK that also supports additional programming languages and execution models. With the new GraalVM releases on Tuesday some of the changes include:

- Added support for the ZGC garbage collector in catering to workloads requiring low latency or a very large heap size.

- The Ideal Graph Visualizer "IGV" has been open-sourced. IGV can be used for analyzing compilation graphs and figuring out performance issues.

- Support for building a native executable from a self-contained bundle on-demand.

- Improved the memory footprint of the Native Image build process.

- GraalVM's Native Image now targets the x86-64-v3 architecture by default. Native Image also now allows "-march=" to be specified including "-march=native" if wanting to generate Native Image builds for best performance on your hardware.

- An experimental RISC-V mode for Native Image via the LLVM back-end.

- BigInteger interoperability has been added to GraalVM's JavaScript support.

- GraalVM's Polyglot embedding now supports running untrusted applications in a code sandbox.

- Various performance improvements.

Downloads of the GraalVM JDK20 community edition builds can be found on GitHub. More details on the new GraalVM updates via the GraalVM Medium.com blog.