4 ms·

Ten Things You Can Do with GraalVM (2018)

51 points by uticus 3y ago

amelius 3y ago
One thing they didn't mention you can do with GraalVM: Getting sued by Oracle. /s
- psd1 3y 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.
- chris_overseas 3y 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.html https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/graal-free-license... https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/graalvm-free-license https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/graalvm-free-license
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - belter 3y 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-3c9a97cbfe36 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-hunt-for-Java-non-compliance https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365531580/Oracle-goes-on...
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Just stick to the non-enterprise version. Also, a medium article is hardly the arbiter of truth (and it talks about the enterprise version that became free recently)
- appleflaxen 3y ago
  You nailed it This was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.
manojlds 3y ago
Buzz around GraalVM died very quickly though. I had high hopes for it and innovation based on it.
- ccleve 3y ago
  I still have high hopes. But man, the pace of development on this project is slow.
  - uticus 3y ago
    I was first introduced via TruffleRuby. But since then it's become less clear to me how viable TruffleRuby is versus JRuby.
  - kaba0 3y 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.
fulafel 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
    - abc_lisper 3y ago
      Oh, we know the reason. It is because UI looked ugly and the latency was high.
  - fulafel 3y 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_lisper 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893120

51 points by uticus 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

One thing they didn't mention you can do with GraalVM: Getting sued by Oracle. /s

psd1 3y 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.
chris_overseas 3y 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.html https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/graal-free-license... https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/graalvm-free-license https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/graalvm-free-license
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- belter 3y 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-3c9a97cbfe36 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-hunt-for-Java-non-compliance https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365531580/Oracle-goes-on...
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Just stick to the non-enterprise version. Also, a medium article is hardly the arbiter of truth (and it talks about the enterprise version that became free recently)
appleflaxen 3y ago
You nailed it This was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.

manojlds 3y ago

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

ccleve 3y ago
I still have high hopes. But man, the pace of development on this project is slow.
- uticus 3y ago
  I was first introduced via TruffleRuby. But since then it's become less clear to me how viable TruffleRuby is versus JRuby.
- kaba0 3y 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.

fulafel 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - abc_lisper 3y ago
    Oh, we know the reason. It is because UI looked ugly and the latency was high.
- fulafel 3y 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_lisper 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893120