I've been following Graal for quite some time, both as a former PLDI guy but also for my day job. I work in bioinformatics software (mostly cancer genomics research) and our group has a ton of (mostly legacy) code in Java and R, but most of the newly-minted grads coming in lean towards Python.
As one of the guys pulling all this stuff together, the Graal "polyglot" multilingual VM concept is of tremendous interest as you can imagine. It would be great to be able to package the legacy stuff interoperably with the new stuff no matter the language, even setting aside the bonus of better performance. But it has basically no practical use to us without Python (+ packages!) due to the direction and language inclinations of the group.
Is there anything new happening on that front? Or anything we could do to help it along? Is there more a detailed status page anywhere? Any sense of when this might land in a truly usable form, or what's the hold up?
I'm a bit surprised that the progress with R (with packages) is so far along but the progress with Python (with packages) seems stagnant (at least according to that README). No offense meant to the team, but that's the appearance. Is it the GIL?
[1] https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython, which calls it "early-stage experimental" and "very likely that any Python program that requires any packages at all will hit something unsupported".