Ten Things You Can Do with GraalVM (2018)

https://gist.github.com/chrisseaton/535e0e80ea19803d5529c623c6beb921

by uticus • 3 years ago

51 18 3 years ago

gist.github.com

amelius• 3 years ago

One thing they didn't mention you can do with GraalVM:

Getting sued by Oracle.

chris_overseas• 3 years ago

/s noted, and sure Oracle are litigious, but the GPL community version of GraalVM, plus "early adopter" enterprise version licence[0] seems farily clear, and reasonable - at least as far as Oracle are concerned?

[0] https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/graal-free-license... https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/graalvm-free-license

belter• 3 years ago

This is Oracle you are talking about...clear and reasonable are not part of their vocabulary. Fantastic technology, massive legals risks.

"Is GraalVM Free for production use?" - https://lvijay.medium.com/is-graalvm-free-for-production-use...

"...Note that the licensing terms with GraalVM are different from those of OpenJDK. In the case of OpenJDK the risk you open yourself to is security compliance (which you might overcome using other means) in the case of GraalVM you are in violation of the license at the end of 4 years. Unlike security compliance however, you can purchase a license from Oracle and bring yourself into the legal all-clear..."

"Oracle goes on hunt for Java non-compliance" - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365531580/Oracle-goes-on...

appleflaxen• 3 years ago

You nailed it

This was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.

psd1• 3 years ago

No sarcasm tag required. Exposure to oracle is a business risk. I expect any architect to think pretty hard before allowing anything owned by oracle into the stack.

manojlds• 3 years ago

Buzz around GraalVM died very quickly though. I had high hopes for it and innovation based on it.

ccleve• 3 years ago

I still have high hopes. But man, the pace of development on this project is slow.

uticus• 3 years ago

I was first introduced via TruffleRuby. But since then it's become less clear to me how viable TruffleRuby is versus JRuby.

kaba02• 3 years ago

How is it slow? At least compared to similar kind of projects? It is most definitely not a CRUD app you can just throw more devs at.

The project is quite young and already has a JS interpreter that is on-par with V8 when warmed up, and a Ruby interpreter that is roughly 3x faster then the next fastest one. Oh and in the meanwhile, they can run optimizations across language boundaries, that’s just insanely cool!

Sure, the good performance is partially due to the underlying JVM that has seen plenty of development time, but I think that Graal develops in a decent pace.

fulafel2• 3 years ago

This gist narrowly predates Clojure GraalVM tooling that enables eg Babashka and Clojure usage in cloud FaaS with low cold start latency. And quick startup CLI tools like clj-kondo (a Clojure linter).

It seems there's some WebAssembly related things cooking GraalVM, currently just support for running wasm binaries but will be be interesting to see if eventually we get support for targeting WebAssembly (if WebAssembly one day gets good GC support).

kasajian• 3 years ago

The decision to make Clojure JVM based and so slow to startup has slowed it's adoption to a much more significant level than anyone in the Clojure community is willing to accept.

chii• 3 years ago

is slow startup really such a big issue for the use cases that clojure aims to address?

I find most web server applications do not require fast startup times. its only recently with the advent of serverless that it is a potential problem.

And for desktop applications, the jvm platform itself is the bigger friction, rather than slow startup times. People just didn't prefer the non-nativeness of the jvm for some reason.

fulafel2• 3 years ago

I think the lowish % of people using GraalVM, Babashka and ClojureScript-on-Node and lack of other supporting evidence make this theory dubious.

abc_lisper2• 3 years ago

And yet, the percentage of Java programmers using clojure is less than 1%. Looked at another way, how many applications need the fast startup time, and why can’t they be run in a daemon?

xonix• 3 years ago

For me the most relevant selling point of GraalVM is beeing able to compile to native self-contained executable. But on the other hand, Golang delivers on this aspect much better (or at least much faster).

gavinray• 3 years ago

RIP Chris, he was a true gem in the community. Often answered questions I had on the Graal slack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893120

Ten Things You Can Do with GraalVM (2018)

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