Book Image

Supercharge Your Applications with GraalVM

By : A B Vijay Kumar
Book Image

Supercharge Your Applications with GraalVM

By: A B Vijay Kumar

Overview of this book

GraalVM is a universal virtual machine that allows programmers to compile and run applications written in both JVM and non-JVM languages. It improves the performance and efficiency of applications, making it an ideal companion for cloud-native or microservices-based applications. This book is a hands-on guide, with step-by-step instructions on how to work with GraalVM. Starting with a quick introduction to the GraalVM architecture and how things work under the hood, you'll discover the performance benefits of running your Java applications on GraalVM. You'll then learn how to create native images and understand how AOT (ahead-of-time) can improve application performance significantly. The book covers examples of building polyglot applications that will help you explore the interoperability between languages running on the same VM. You'll also see how you can use the Truffle framework to implement any language of your choice to run optimally on GraalVM. By the end of this book, you'll not only have learned how GraalVM is beneficial in cloud-native and microservices development but also how to leverage its capabilities to create high-performing polyglot applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Evolution of JVM
4
Section 2: Getting Up and Running with GraalVM – Architecture and Implementation
8
Section 3: Polyglot with Graal
13
Section 4: Microservices with Graal

Chapter 3 – Graal VM Architecture

  1. GraalVM comes in two versions – Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. Refer to Reviewing the GraalVM editions section for more details.
  2. JVMCI stands for Java Virtual Machine Compiler Interface. Java 9 and above provide a way to implement custom JIT compilers. JVMCI provides an API to implement these custom compilers and provides access to JVM objects and the code cache. Graal JIT is an implementation of JVMCI. Refer to the Java Virtual Machine Compiler Interface (JVMCI) section for more details.
  3. Graal JIT replaces the C2 JIT compiler. Graal JIT is completely written in Java from the ground up but uses the hardened logic and best practices of the C2 compiler. Graal JIT implements better optimization strategies than C2 JIT, making it the best JIT compiler for Java. Graal JIT can also be used to compile other languages that are converted into intermediate representations in order to use the advanced optimization strategies...