Very cool. I wasn't aware of that. Do you think this will help introduce more "low level" features in Java since it is paramount to at least keep the same level of performance, and definitely improve it in the future?
Jalapeño from IBM,
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.25.8...
Sun's own Squawk VM, used on Sun SPOT before IoT was a thing.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221320697_The_squaw...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_SPOT
Regarding Project Metropolis specifically, you can find the information here.
"Your next JVM: Panama, Valhalla, Metropolis by John Rose"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMk5KoUIOy4
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/metropolis/Metropolis-Prop...
Note that I wasn't completely fair, the .NET team also has some plans to incrementally move the runtime into C#, but so far it has only been mentioned on an InfoQ interview, no official plans revealed.
https://www.infoq.com/articles/virtual-panel-dotnet-future
"So, in my view, the primary trend is moving our existing C++ codebase to C#. It makes us so much more efficient and enables a broader set of .NET developers to reason about the base platform more easily and also contribute."