Oracle Ships GraalVM 1.0 To "Run Programs Faster Anywhere"

Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release.

GraalVM is the latest virtual machine project out of Oracle and aims to be a "universal VM for a polyglot world" and one that can "run programs faster anywhere."

GraalVM aims to be a polyglot VM with zero-overhead interoperability between programming languages, provide native images, and work with a wide array of languages. GraalVM aims to work with JVM-based languages like Java / Scala / Kotlin, supports JavaScript and Node.js, can also handle LLVM bitcode created from code-bases like C/C++ and Rust, and there is also experimental language support for Ruby / R / Python.

GraalVM is also embed-able and can be run inside OpenJDK or even databases like MySQL and Oracle Database. For the 1.0 release, they say the JVM-based language support is production ready while the R / Python / Ruby / LLVM support is considered experimental.

Those wishing to learn more about GraalVM 1.0 can read Oracle's announcement or head directly to GraalVM.org. The code is hosted on GitHub.

I'll work on trying to get some benchmarks out of GraalVM soon, assuming this isn't yet another Oracle project where the company tries to enforce a no public benchmarking without approval rule.