Tuesday, February 15, 2022

GraalVM - Community Edition Short Comings

 I think the GraalVM technology is pretty awesome and it or similar technology probably has a bright future.  The ability to compile down to an optimized native code has lots of positives.

  • Startup speed faster
  • containerized image sizes reduced
  • memory foot print reduced
Given those benefits, what could be a negative?  

Well, what jumps out at me from documentation relates to garbage collection.  If you are using the community edition then you get the Serial GC where as the G1 GC (multi-threaded GC optimized to reduce stop the world GC pauses) is ONLY available with the Enterprise edition.

I find that to be a pretty limiting factor for anyone doing development in a business setting but not wanting to pay fees.  Some indications of cost were found here

Being that the community edition is open source, I do wonder whether there is potential for someone to add in a more scalable garbage collector into the open source version or a fork of it?

Have an awesome day!
Scott

No comments:

Post a Comment