It was an exciting year for GraalVM. Back in April, we published our first release candidate and announced that GraalVM is ready to be experimented with and evaluated on real-world workloads.

We got tons of feedback, hundreds of issues, and even more feature requests, which we, again and again, tried to incorporate, fix, and add to the next builds of GraalVM. First of all, thank you! Without the support of the community, we couldn’t make such progress in 2018. Thank you to everyone who experimented with GraalVM or any of its parts! We’re looking forward to 2019 with increasing excitement to see what new challenges you will solve with the unique capabilities of GraalVM.

Internally, we are running Java deployments on GraalVM. Externally, known companies are evaluating Java and Node.js interoperability, bringing their custom programming languages to GraalVM, shipping GraalVM native images, and even running the actual builds of GraalVM in production!

This beginning of the new year can be a great opportunity to find some time to discover new technologies, so please give GraalVM a try. We recommend starting with this comprehensive list of GraalVM capabilities selected for you: Top 10 Things To Do With GraalVM.

We’re always happy to receive more feedback and help the community to use it in the best way possible!

As a look back, we would like to highlight popular articles and videos about GraalVM.

Videos

Deep dive into using GraalVM for Java and JavaScript developers by Thomas Wuerthinger and Oleg Šelajev:

Twitter is using Graal compiler to speed up their Scala workloads — by Chris Thalinger, from the Twitter VM Engineering team:

Jackie Haynes and Zachary Fernandez from Goldman Sachs share their experience migrating their custom language for credit and risk calculations to the GraalVM platform:

Spring framework team began working with us to make Spring applications start instantly with the GraalVM native images. There’s more work to be done, but this is an incredibly important collaboration we’re very excited about! See the Spring Boot with Kotlin, functional configuration and GraalVM session by Sébastien Deleuze from Pivotal:

Achieve instant startup and ultra-low memory footprint using Micronaut’s AOT compilation support and GraalVM with Graeme Rocher, OCI:

Petr Zapletal from Disney Streaming Services shares his experience with GraalVM:

There were more sessions about GraalVM and its components, for example, covering the Ruby support with TruffleRuby by Benoit Daloze:

Python and R:

And even more about the native images, for example, Native Clojure with GraalVM by Jan Stępień:

Articles

Aleksandar Prokopec shows how you can achieve a performance improvement of between 2x and 5x on Stream-based programs with GraalVM:

The compilation time might no longer be the most common challenge for Scala developers, as GraalVM makes the Scala compiler run 30% faster:

Clojure community embraced GraalVM native images to reduce memory usage and startup time:

If you consider migrating from Nashorn, check out this guide by Christian Wirth:

Running JavaScript and Python in the Oracle Database is now possible with GraalVM:

Learn how GraalVM can change the game for Java and serverless:

Even more insightful and practical posts you can find on our Medium blog.