The Graal team is huge. Like, I don't know, at least 70 people and probably more. So that's very expensive. Oracle Java is best understood as two competing tea

The Graal team is huge. Like, I don't know, at least 70 people and probably more. So that's very expensive. Oracle Java is best understood as two competing teams at this point. In theory GraalVM started out as a research project to feed improvements back to HotSpot and some of that they've done, like with the JVMCI interface that was added. But it didn't work out that way for whatever reason and GraalVM is now effectively a competitor to the 'classical' Sun Java product guys. They have different brand names, commercial models, feature priorities, price points, they are different organisations within the company. Fortunately GraalVM is not a fork of OpenJDK - it's a bunch of plugins and extra components, more or less. But at some level the difference is semantic because if you swap out the whole JIT compiler then maybe it actually is a fork? Not sure. Anyway the original research vision was that C2 would be replaced by Graal indeed. The politics of merging such a total rewrite would be difficult at the best of times and it seems Oracle hasn't managed it, or perhaps they like having some internal competition for the OpenJDK guys. Certainly Graal team cares a lot more about modern marketing, about getting their tech adopted into other Oracle products and things that presumably Oracle management care about. Like the graalvm.org website vs the OpenJDK website is no competition. The former feels like an actual product, the latter is a bunch of wiki pages more or less.