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 6: Truffle for Multi-language (Polyglot) support

Support for polyglot development is one of the biggest features of GraalVM. In Chapter 4, Graal Just-In-Time Compiler, and Chapter 5, Graal Ahead-of-Time Compiler and Native Image, we went into a lot of detail on how Graal optimizes code, both at build time and run time. We have only used Java in all the previous chapters. However, GraalVM extends most of its advanced features to other programming languages too. GraalVM provides a language implementation framework called Truffle Language Implementation Framework (commonly known as Truffle).

GraalVM not only provides a high-performance runtime for JVM languages such as Java, Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala, but it also supports non-JVM languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, R, WebAssembly, and LLVM languages that implement Truffle. A lot more languages are being implemented on Truffle.

This chapter provides a conceptual view of how Truffle helps guest language developers...