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Comment by ravedave5 | Hacker News Reader

Graal seems to be continually almost ready to use, but never quite there.

What do you mean? I've been using it as the default JVM since 2019 or so in both development and production.

My experience has involved zero headaches or serious problems due to Graal, and it comes with appreciable performance improvements.

One of the more impressive and badass hardcore programming language engineering efforts, and still under active development right now. It's remarkable technology.

Amazing that it comes from within Oracle, I was surprised.

My experience has involved zero headaches

How? most libs use reflection.

GraalVM comes with its own JIT the Graal Compiler [1] which I believe was what metadat was talking about. You are probably thinking about the native image generation which can cause issues with reflection and other dynamic constructs.

[1] https://www.graalvm.org/22.3/reference-manual/java/compiler/

Reflection only matters if you are using graal for AOT. It's still a full JVM.

Also, reflection is supported in AOT mode. The analysis, however, does require reachability metadata in some cases. In the best case, libraries provide and maintain appropriate configuration for this. Reachability metadata can also be shared via https://github.com/oracle/graalvm-reachability-metadata.

There's two pieces to GraalVM:

1. The new JIT

2. The Native Image, AOT

Reflection is an issue for (2), not (1).

Are you able to use JFR or similar tools with GraalVM?

Twitter has been using it in production for ages now.

Another vote from me for "I use it in regular JIT/JVM mode for my daily development + production JVM".

It's a kickass JVM with stellar performance and bonus profiling/observability tools.

Twitter runs most of their infrastructure on Graal EE, so it sounds quite reliable to me.

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