oracle

graal

Java2016–2026

oracle / graal

graal

GraalVM compiles applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀

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94Distinct people

146Mentions

2Explicit recommenders

21.8KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

GraalVM compiles applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

"I love the promise of Graal native binaries. At the moment I'm unable to get it to work with my codebase." [2] "Building is a resource hog. I set up a VM with 2 CPUs, 100GB of…

Mawr used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

babashka/babashka · linked in 3 of the same discussions
openjdk/jdk · linked in 2 of the same discussions
oracle/graaljs · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:34:28 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year146 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-07-08 13:46:19 UTC to 2026-10-02 12:57:29 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	12	5	7
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	32	4	28
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	24	3	21
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	0	6
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	15	1	14
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	19	3	16
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	9	0	9
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	11	1	10
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	10	2	8
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	1	4

What Hacker News says

9 sources

geokon·Dec 12, 2023

Hmmm，yeah I should really just try GraalVM. JavaFX finally supports it. I just remmeber it was a bit unclear how to hook it up with Clojure/deps.edn but I'm sure the tooling has evolved since I last looked Some day they'll integrate cosmopolitan builds with Graal native and we'll come full circle to cross-platform executables haha Edit : https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/4854

In FFM (Foreign Function and Memory API) Goes Final

mdaniel·Oct 4, 2023

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

In Level-up your Java Debugging Skills with on-demand Debugging

crustycoder·Sep 20, 2023

https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/substratevm/src/... https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/substratevm/src/... And in any case: JEP draft: Prepare to Restrict The Use of JNI https://openjdk.org/jeps/8307341 JEP 442: Foreign Function & Memory API (Third Preview) https://openjdk.org/jeps/442

In Leveraging Rust in our Java database

wice·Sep 17, 2023

GraalVm is great, it made our Spring REST API app go from 10+ seconds to 0.5 seconds on startup (not to mention the lower mem and cpu requirements). Except… when we try to build it with Jenkins on a Kubernetes cluster, this happens: https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182

In Java 21 makes me like Java again

nvm0n2·Aug 29, 2023

Why would they? The direction for safer JVM research is to implement JVMs in Java, which has the advantage of being both memory safe outside a few tiny core areas (same as rust) whilst having cleaner code than the Rust impl (none of these problems with lifetimes). See here: https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/substratevm/src

In A JVM in Rust part 5 – Executing instructions

capableweb·Aug 10, 2023

Ah, yeah, that's probably a bit far off in the future. Probably would be possible via GraalVM once GC is available, https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/3391

In A History of Clojure (2020) [pdf]

mike_hearn·Aug 1, 2023

Hypothesis: maybe this guy would have been better off learning SystemJava instead of Rust? Given that he already knows Java. SystemJava is a very odd animal. It's a Java superset that is sort of hidden away inside the Graal project and not really advertised. SystemJava is Java for systems programming, proven out by its use to write a full JVM (with garbage collector etc, all in Java). SystemJava is syntactically identical to Java, so all existing tools and IDEs can work with it. However the semantics are quite different: 1. It's always compiled ahead of time to a standard platform native binary (exe or lib). 2. You can do both GCd and manual memory allocation, pointer arithmetic, stack allocation, calling in and out of C without JNI and so on. 3. Some objects are "magic" and not compiled as objects at all like CWordPointer which lets you

Read the rest

do raw ptr derefs. Tutorial example file: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/14d366284d137415f3defb2... With this you can do things like make what appears to be a C library on the outside, but write it with Java on the inside. The parts of the runtime needed will be compiled into the binary. You can rely on the GC for anything that isn't performance sensitive, and use manual memory management for the rest. Or you can use the GraalEE version which has the G1 GC that is these days very fast and powerful, without needing much tuning. SystemJava doesn't have anything like the Rust type system, so it won't catch data races or double frees (when working with manually managed memory). But it might have been a better tradeoff given the skills profile of this team.

In Rust Absolutely Positively Sucks [video]

mike_hearn·May 9, 2023

Yes, and it will JIT compile the code to native if you're using GraalVM: https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/wasm But the point of JNI is to provide language bindings. WASM doesn't automatically fix the need for those.

In CheerpJ 3.0: a JVM replacement in HTML5 and WASM to run Java on modern browsers

Mawr·Mar 29, 2023Recommendation phrase

"I love the promise of Graal native binaries. At the moment I'm unable to get it to work with my codebase." [2] "Building is a resource hog. I set up a VM with 2 CPUs, 100GB of disk space, and 8GB of memory, and even a relatively small project took over 10 minutes to build." [3] "the power of the Java ecosystem is libraries, but you cannot use 99% of them because they just use too much reflection and I am afraid they will never be prepared for Spring AOT" [3] "DI does not work inside a native binary at runtime, you need some tool which does the whole DI at compile time (Spring Native and Quarkus do that)" [1] "I do not even think we are in the alpha stage. For example, for 2 days I am fighting with a simple microservice using JPA, MySQL, some transactions and without success. Fixed at least 4 bugs, and now I gave up. I cannot imagine what

Read the rest

problems can arise in mid-size projects." [3] "GraalVM [not] supporting Swing and JavaFX "out of the box"." [4] "Even assuming your app run as intended (which is already complicated enough, you will have to run their java agent to register all reflections), there is no telling how it will perform. For example record methods are currently implemented using reflection which completely obliterate performance: https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/4348" [1] This is my pet peeve. Presumably you're very familiar with the single binary Java deployment story you're describing. And yet, somehow everything you say is false. It's incredibly vexing to have to go out and verify such claims about subject matters that I'm not that familiar with because the supposed experts are basically lying through their teeth :/ [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/vc9s3u/what_is_your_e... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/e9m51x/whats_your_opi... [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/10cv886/personal_expe... [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/wodoy4/if_you_were_th...

In The simplicity of single-file Golang deployments