fcurts

The conclusions that the article draws in "What does the new release train mean to my company?" are completely wrong.

Starting with Java 11, Oracle JDK is no longer free for commercial use, not even for a single day. However, as long as people are OK with GPL v2 + Classpath Exception (which is more permissive than it sounds) and don't need support from Oracle, they can just move to OpenJDK, which is built from the exact same codebase.

Shoutout to https://adoptopenjdk.net, which plans to ship LTS releases of OpenJDK. I believe this will be crucial for keeping the Java ecosystem healthy.

Unfortunately, the conclusions that the article draws in "What does the new release train mean to my company?" are wrong.

Starting with Java 11, Oracle JDK is no longer free for commercial use, not even for a single day. However, as long as people are OK with GPL v2 + Classpath Exception (which is more permissive than it sounds) and don't need support from Oracle, they can just move to OpenJDK, which is built from the exact same codebase.

Shoutout to https://adoptopenjdk.net, which plans to provide LTS releases of OpenJDK. I believe this will be crucial for a healthy Java ecosystem.

Performance gains of GraalVM's AOT are drastically reduced startup time (1 ms for my Java/Kotlin command-line applications), elimination of JIT warmup time, and reduced memory footprint. For peak performance of a language as dynamic as Java, a JIT is hard to beat. Profile-guided optimizations will narrow the gap but are only available in GraalVM Enterprise Edition. Native executables also have a less sophisticated GC than HotSpot.

> Now GraalVM provides a polyglot runtime for JavaScript and Ruby, but my understanding is it'll be commercial-only once it's released. So in a way, Oracle is preparing a Java exit strategy themselves :)

Your understanding is wrong.

GraalVM comes in two editions: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) (https://www.graalvm.org/downloads/).

Community Edition is open-source (https://github.com/oracle/graal) and has a relatively permissive license (GPL v2 + Classpath exception, all source files have the Classpath exception). The Classpath exception was added recently and will make a world of a difference.

Enterprise Edition provides additional optimizations and commercial support. Nevertheless, CE will take you a long way. Twitter says they have achieved a 12% speedup in the real world by running their Scala services with CE's Graal JIT.

All language implementations have been open-sourced by now (except for some EE optimizations). Most of them (including Graal.js and TruffleRuby) are licensed under Universal Permissive License or Eclipse Public License.

My favorite use of GraalVM is creating native executables with Substrate VM. Works great and brings startup time of my Java/Kotlin command-line applications down to 1 ms.