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

Learning Truffle DSL

Truffle defines a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) based on the Java annotation processor. The language developer has to write a lot of boilerplate code to manage the states of the specializations. To appreciate how Truffle DSL makes a programmer's life easy, let's take a quick example:

c = a + b

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, in AST, every operation and operand is represented as a node. In Truffle, it is a Java class derived from com.oracle.truffle.api.nodes.Node. To understand the need for a DSL, let's oversimplify the implementation of AST for the preceding expression.

Since we are looking at dynamically typed languages, a and b can be any type. We need an expression node that should implement an execute method, which checks for all the possible types for a and b. We will have to write logic something like this:

Figure 6.5 – Guard checks for implementing specialization – flow chart

In the...