4 ms·

+1 for Spring boot and the Spring ecosystem in general. I said it here a few weeks back, Pivotal(the company behind Spring) continue to keep that ecosystem inno

+1 for Spring boot and the Spring ecosystem in general. I said it here a few weeks back, Pivotal(the company behind Spring) continue to keep that ecosystem innovative, modern, stable and performant and open sourced. That’s amazing... We had a few rails developers work port some of their apps to Spring Boot, they struggled initially but after getting over that hump their feedback was it’s light years ahead of rails in terms of ease of use and performance. Easy of use = Groovy & Kotlin both of which compile to the JVM The real game changer is when Spring runs on GraalVM. Once that happens it would be really really hard to beat java on the backend

tannhaeuser 8y ago
I agree Spring has for most intents and purposes won the framework wars (which however also speaks to the relative stagnation in that space). What do you specifically expect from Spring running on GraalVM? I'm not sure about the availability and maturity of the new-fangled Graal/Truffle/SubstrateVM stuff. I've being eying migration strategies away from the JVM for quite some time now, and towards JavaScript specifically due to its momentum and portability. Both Oracle and RedHat (or their employees as personal projects) had been running efforts for a node.js-compatible runtime system on the JVM several years ago. Now GraalVM provides a polyglot runtime for JavaScript and Ruby, but my understanding is it'll be commercial-only once it's released. So in a way, Oracle is preparing a Java exit strategy themselves :)
- victor106 8y ago
  > What do you specifically expect from Spring running on GraalVM? Mostly performance gains you get from AOT. I think GraalVM ( or similar technologies) is going to be a game changer for all langs that compile to intermediary byte code. Unfortunately, GraalVM does not compile Spring as Spring uses reflection a lot and GraalVM does not fully support reflection. https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/348 https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/348
  - fcurts 8y ago
    Performance gains of GraalVM's AOT are drastically reduced startup time (1 ms for my Java/Kotlin command-line applications), elimination of JIT warmup time, and reduced memory footprint. For peak performance of a language as dynamic as Java, a JIT is hard to beat. Profile-guided optimizations will narrow the gap but are only available in GraalVM Enterprise Edition. Native executables also have a less sophisticated GC than HotSpot.
    - victor106 8y ago
      Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Its insights like this that make hn so awesome.
- fcurts 8y ago
  > Now GraalVM provides a polyglot runtime for JavaScript and Ruby, but my understanding is it'll be commercial-only once it's released. So in a way, Oracle is preparing a Java exit strategy themselves :) Your understanding is wrong. GraalVM comes in two editions: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) (https://www.graalvm.org/downloads/ https://www.graalvm.org/downloads/). Community Edition is open-source (https://github.com/oracle/graal https://github.com/oracle/graal) and has a relatively permissive license (GPL v2 + Classpath exception, all source files have the Classpath exception). The Classpath exception was added recently and will make a world of a difference. Enterprise Edition provides additional optimizations and commercial support. Nevertheless, CE will take you a long way. Twitter says they have achieved a 12% speedup in the real world by running their Scala services with CE's Graal JIT. All language implementations have been open-sourced by now (except for some EE optimizations). Most of them (including Graal.js and TruffleRuby) are licensed under Universal Permissive License or Eclipse Public License. My favorite use of GraalVM is creating native executables with Substrate VM. Works great and brings startup time of my Java/Kotlin command-line applications down to 1 ms.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I agree Spring has for most intents and purposes won the framework wars (which however also speaks to the relative stagnation in that space). What do you specifically expect from Spring running on GraalVM? I'm not sure about the availability and maturity of the new-fangled Graal/Truffle/SubstrateVM stuff. I've being eying migration strategies away from the JVM for quite some time now, and towards JavaScript specifically due to its momentum and portability. Both Oracle and RedHat (or their employees as personal projects) had been running efforts for a node.js-compatible runtime system on the JVM several years ago. Now GraalVM provides a polyglot runtime for JavaScript and Ruby, but my understanding is it'll be commercial-only once it's released. So in a way, Oracle is preparing a Java exit strategy themselves :)

victor106 8y ago
> What do you specifically expect from Spring running on GraalVM? Mostly performance gains you get from AOT. I think GraalVM ( or similar technologies) is going to be a game changer for all langs that compile to intermediary byte code. Unfortunately, GraalVM does not compile Spring as Spring uses reflection a lot and GraalVM does not fully support reflection. https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/348 https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/348
- fcurts 8y ago
  Performance gains of GraalVM's AOT are drastically reduced startup time (1 ms for my Java/Kotlin command-line applications), elimination of JIT warmup time, and reduced memory footprint. For peak performance of a language as dynamic as Java, a JIT is hard to beat. Profile-guided optimizations will narrow the gap but are only available in GraalVM Enterprise Edition. Native executables also have a less sophisticated GC than HotSpot.
  - victor106 8y ago
    Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Its insights like this that make hn so awesome.
fcurts 8y ago
> Now GraalVM provides a polyglot runtime for JavaScript and Ruby, but my understanding is it'll be commercial-only once it's released. So in a way, Oracle is preparing a Java exit strategy themselves :) Your understanding is wrong. GraalVM comes in two editions: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) (https://www.graalvm.org/downloads/ https://www.graalvm.org/downloads/). Community Edition is open-source (https://github.com/oracle/graal https://github.com/oracle/graal) and has a relatively permissive license (GPL v2 + Classpath exception, all source files have the Classpath exception). The Classpath exception was added recently and will make a world of a difference. Enterprise Edition provides additional optimizations and commercial support. Nevertheless, CE will take you a long way. Twitter says they have achieved a 12% speedup in the real world by running their Scala services with CE's Graal JIT. All language implementations have been open-sourced by now (except for some EE optimizations). Most of them (including Graal.js and TruffleRuby) are licensed under Universal Permissive License or Eclipse Public License. My favorite use of GraalVM is creating native executables with Substrate VM. Works great and brings startup time of my Java/Kotlin command-line applications down to 1 ms.