GraalVM 21.0 Released With Experimental JVM On Truffle

Oracle on Tuesday released GraalVM 21.0 as the latest version of their Java VM/JDK that also supports other languages and modes of execution.

One of the notable additions with GraalVM 21.0 is supporting Java on Truffle, as an example JVM implementation using the Truffle interpreter. GraalVM's Truffle framework is an open-source library for writing programming language interpreters. With Java on Truffle, it's of the same nature as the likes of JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and R within the GraalVM ecosystem. Java on Truffle allows for improved isolation from the host JVM, run Java bytecode in a separate context from the JVM, running in the context of a native image but with dynamically loaded bytecode allowed, and other Truffle framework features. More details about the Java on Truffle implementation via the GraalVM manual.

Besides GraalVM 21.0 adding experimental Java on Truffle, there is now serialization support for Native Image, AWT and Swing support on Linux with Native Image, improved NI garbage collection performance, Python compatibility support improvements, macOS Big Sur support, and the never-ending performance optimizations.

Oracle's community edition of GraalVM 21.0 is available from GitHub.