Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheUndead96 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that GraalVM is not mentioned. I have strong suspicions that Oracle is lining up Graal to become the next default JVM, after watching some talks from core developers describing how fragile the Hotspot codebase has become. Graal would be a good way to encourage ML, given it has language support for Python. Perhaps Graal is just not ready for Oracle to show all of their cards at this point. Or perhaps my theory is incorrect.

View on HN

GraalVM is HotSpot. The SubstrateVM used in native-image has a lot of limitations and performance that can match regular HotSpot with C2 is something you have to pay for.

HotSpot is a pretty great codebase actually. It's very easy to read compared to the CLR. The issue with it isn't that it's bad code or fragile, it's just that it's very complex, but they're reducing complexity over time by removing obsolete optimisations (obsolete, or so they argue).

The SVM codebase is also nice but it's a very different model. Over time the codebases may be merging, as Graal the compiler gradually replaces C2. But that could easily take a decade.

> I'm surprised that GraalVM is not mentioned.

Java and GraalVM come from two different parts of the company. They're aren't done by the same people.

They still need some more time with GraalVM. Currently you need Microsoft's C++ Compiler in order to use GraalVM on Windows. They will need time to polish these things... But GraalVM performance is already on par with HotSpot - with better startup times!

> Currently you need Microsoft's C++ Compiler in order to use GraalVM on Windows

No need for xcode on os x or gcc on Linux, or clang on bsds?

You need xcode on OS/X and gcc on Linux. See here: https://www.graalvm.org/reference-manual/native-image/#prere...

Maybe I misunderstood your post then - why is needing the platform c++ compiler an issue on windows, but not mac/linux?

It is an issue for all platforms - I just mentioned Windows, because I work on Windows. And the issue is: Why do I need a C++ compiler if I would like to develop in Java?

No need for suspicions, that is officially known as Project Metropolis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com