Introducing the GraalVM project

Oracle has worked for several years on a high-performance Java VM and associated tools, known together as the GraalVM project (https://www.graalvm.org). It was launched back in April 2018 (https://medium.com/graalvm/graalvm-in-2018-b5fa7ff3b917), but work can be traced back to, for example, a research paper from Oracle Labs in 2013 on the subject: Maxine: An approachable virtual machine for, and in, java; see https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2400682.2400689.

Fun Fact: The Maxine VM is known as a metacircular Java VM implementation, meaning that it is, itself, written in Java.

GraalVM’s VM is polyglot, supporting not only traditional Java VM languages such as Java, Kotlin, and Scala but also languages such as JavaScript, C, C++, Ruby, Python, and even programs compiled into a WebAssembly. The part of GraalVM that we will focus on is its Native Image compiler, which can be used to compile Java bytecode into a Native Image containing...