Oracle is positioning GraalVM, the company’s open source, polyglot virtual machine, as a substitute or replacement for Google’s Go (golang). Described as a “universal VM,” GraalVM can run applications written in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C, and C++, and JVM languages including Java, Kotlin, and Scala.
The Oracle developers behind the project say that GraalVM, like Go, offers fast startup and a small memory footprint. But with GraalVM, developers can still leverage the Java ecosystem. Further, these languages can be interoperable in the shared runtime, supporting the ability to pass a JavaScript object to Python, for example. GraalVM also offers ahead-of-time compilation for Java code.
