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Comment by grashalm01 | Hacker News Reader

Graal dev here. We're testing on jdk 8,9,10 and 11. We are packing graalvm with jdk 8 atm to keep variability reasonable. Graal will be integrated into the JVM soon with project Metropolis: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/metropolis/

Graal is used for many more things than dynamically compiling Java. Besides others it's used for SubstrateVM (closed world AOT compilation) and Truffle languages like TruffleRuby, Graal.JS, FastR, Sulong(llvm integration) and our newest member Graal.Python.

Graal comes out of Oracle Labs. The build tool mx is short for Maxine, the spiritual predecessor of the Graal project. If you don't know mx it's quite intimidating and ugly. It's Python written by Java developers. But it does it's job coping with our not so standard building and testing requirements. No we don't run mx on Graal.Python yet, but we are working on it for full build tool metacircularity ;).

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Vendoring the JDK is a much better use of resources than chasing compatibility, esp for a research project.

Is Graal.Python related to Zippy [0,1] ?

[0] https://github.com/securesystemslab/zippy

[1] http://socalpls.github.io/archive/2013nov/slides/zippy.pdf

It started as fork of Zippy. It changed very much since then. You can download the binary as part of graalvm. It's not yet open source, but it will be. It's just not ready yet.

I've been watching zippy for a while, unfortunately it relies heavily on Jython which is dead. Would be very interested to see progress on this! (And maybe contribute as well!)

I'm sure you will hear about us when we go open source with Python.

Hi - thank you so much for posting here. Please please get rid of MX. Please move to a better build tool - you will pull the ecosystem with you. And people will help you with that.

Secondly - I have not seen Graal Python anywhere. Is there a repo ? The GitHub project seems centred around Truffleruby. Graal Python would be awesome!

We have lots of infrastructure depending on mx. Infrastructure that no other build tool provides as far as I can tell.

In the end every build tool sucks. Sometimes you just need to be pragmatic. Mx integrates with maven pretty well and it generates ide config for intellij, eclipse and netbeans. Moving to a different system is probably not worth the cost atm. And it's not complicated to use at all. E.g mx build builds and mx gate builds and tests. Mx unittest runs unit tests.

As written below. Graal.Python is not yet open source. But you will hear from us soon.

Any story behind why it's not open-source ? I mean Ruby, Js, R seem to have been for a long time.

Any splashy announcements expected?

p.s. sorry to be pushy. I have a long standing python-and-reactjs-on-java-in-2018 bet !

They tend to work in private then open source later.

Why not Graal.py?

Good idea. The name is not final.

For me this would mean a python project (graal bindings within CPython) and not a Python implementation.

CPython Pypy Jython IronPython

I would now go with GraalPython (GrPython or GPython)

Graal.py rubbed me the wrong way, until I read your comment I couldn't put my finger on why. Thank you!

Its more symmetry with Graal.js

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