Oracle has released version 21. 0 of GraallVM. The release of the virtual machine mainly brings news for native images and the Truffle Language Implementation Framework. For the latter there is now an experimental implementation for Java, and the native images can now be serialized.

The GraalVM relies on the Hotspot JVM ( Java Virtual Machine) and has additional tools on board to optimize performance, including a JIT compiler (just-in-time) and an ahead-of-time compiler that translates Java source code into native machine code in advance. GraalVM also offers connections to languages ​​that are not designed for the JVM, such as Python, Ruby or R.

Truffle search with Java The Truffle Language Implementation Framework is a library for connecting any language to the GraalVM. Truffle contains the GraalVM compiler and implementations of some programming languages. With version 21 there is now an experimental implementation of Java on Truffle, which is available for both Java SE 8 and Java SE 11 is designed.

Java on Truffle offers a minimized Java VM that contains all core components and the APIs the Java Runtime Environment Library brings libjvm with it. The implementation is analogous to the GraalVM implementation of JavaScript, Ruby, Python and R. Among other things, it enables the execution of Java bytecode in a different context than that of the actual Java VM. In this way, for example, a Java 8 application can be integrated into a Java 11 application. A kind of sandboxing is also possible, in order to start an unknown application isolated from the actual one.

Extensions for native images GraalVM offers native images as an alternative to the execution of bytecode in the classic JVM: An AOT compiler creates independently executable files which, in addition to the translated classes of the actual application, contain the classes of the runtime library and the dependencies as well as statically linked code from the JDK .

The current GraalVM release enables serialization for native images, for which purpose it ensures that the class constructors end up in the native image during construction. Developers must whitelist the classes to be serialized in a separate configuration file. The GraalVM tracing agent can be used as a support when building the native images.

The latter brings additional functions in the current release and now processes instances of Class.getClasses and Class.getDeclaredClasses . In addition, the AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit) and Swing can now be used in native images to create UIs under Linux.

Beyond Java The other programming languages ​​include the jarray module for Mention Python, which is supposed to ensure compatibility with Jython, a Java implementation of Python. In addition, GraalVM 21 extends the support for the Python library Pandas, which is used in the areas of data science and machine learning, and now links the visualization library Matplotlib.

For JavaScript, the release brings additions to the planned ECMAScript – 2021 – language standards for GraalVM including Promise.any and Logical Assignment Operators with. In addition, Node.js now represents version 12. 20. 1 represents the basis for JavaScript processing.

Further innovations can be found in the release notes. The GraalVM 21. 0 is available in both a Community Edition and an Enterprise version. The former is based on OpenJDK 1.8.0 _ 282 or 11. 0. 10, and the latter relies on the Oracle JDK 1.8.0 _ 281 and the Oracle JDK 11. 0. 10 on.

(rme)