containers VS Graal

Compare containers vs Graal and see what are their differences.

containers

Repo containing the dockerfiles and scripts to produce the official eclipse-temurin containers. (by adoptium)

Graal

GraalVM compiles Java applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀 (by oracle)
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containers Graal
9 156
191 19,807
3.1% 0.5%
8.7 10.0
5 days ago 1 day ago
Dockerfile Java
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

containers

Posts with mentions or reviews of containers. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-19.
  • Need a VM for Java 11 and a specific Program - which distro to choose?
    1 project | /r/selfhosted | 9 Dec 2023
    eclipse-temurin:11 https://hub.docker.com/_/eclipse-temurin
  • CentOS 7 vs CentOS Stream vs Rocky vs Alma vs Debian vs Ubuntu for server
    1 project | /r/sysadmin | 28 May 2023
    Then you build the container. That will download that container that already has linux with java on it, like this one: https://hub.docker.com/_/eclipse-temurin
  • Primeiros passos no desenvolvimento Java em 2023: um guia particular
    13 projects | dev.to | 19 Jan 2023
  • From Java to Golang and back
    1 project | /r/java | 5 Oct 2022
    You can shrink the docker image greatly by starting with an Alpine based one like this https://hub.docker.com/_/eclipse-temurin
  • MinIO passes 1B cumulative Docker Pulls
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Sep 2022
    > Just imagine the vast number of poorly cached CI jobs pulling gigabytes from Docker hub on every commit, coupled with naive aproaches to CI/CD when doing microservices, prod/dev/test deployments, etc.

    I hit the rate limits that others talk of in the comments, which motivated me to use Nexus for both proxying and storing my own container images.

    So far, it's been pretty good, I actually wrote about the process on my blog, "Moving from GitLab Registry to Sonatype Nexus": https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/moving-from-gitlab-registr...

    Another thing that I tried, however, was to only rely upon Docker Hub for the base images that I want (Ubuntu in my case) and then build everything I need on top of that, doing things like installing Java/Node/Python/Ruby/... manually, adding utilities I want across all of the images etc.

    Once again, I wrote about it on my blog, "Using Ubuntu as the base for all of my containers": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...

    That approach is absolutely more work, but also is something that's underexplored and works really nicely for me. Now I mostly rely on the OS package manager repositories (or mirrors of those), put less load on Docker Hub, don't risk running into its rate limits and also have common base layers across most of the images that I build, which in practice means less data actually needing to be downloaded to any of the servers where I want to utilize my images.

    Of course, the downside is that getting something like PHP running was an absolute pain (tried with Apache, didn't work for some reason, then moved over to Nginx), and I technically miss out on some of the more complex space optimizations because if you look at the Dockerfiles for some of the more popular images, like OpenJDK, you'll occasionally see some interesting approaches, like getting the software package as a bunch of files and "installing" them directly, as opposed to using something like apt/yum: https://github.com/adoptium/containers/blob/08dd7d416cee0fe0...

    Then again, personally I'd much prefer to rely on packages that I can get from something like apt directly, even if some of those versions can be a bit older (or add the project's official apt repositories as needed).

  • Question?
    4 projects | /r/docker | 6 Sep 2022
    The FROM looks incorrect. When i watch the Youtube video it mentions adoptopenjdk which is deprecated (https://hub.docker.com/\_/adoptopenjdk). You now should use https://hub.docker.com/_/eclipse-temurin/.
  • Uberjar hosting services?
    1 project | /r/java | 1 Sep 2022
  • Java eclipse temurin:18.0.1_10-jre-alpine is out ! Now what ?
    2 projects | dev.to | 4 May 2022
    Eclipse Temurin is maintaining a rich collection of Java images.
  • Anyone using the Alpine Musl JDK builds in production?
    1 project | /r/java | 14 Mar 2022
    Intially only the 17 was the musl-native variant, later added 11 and very recently (6 days ago) for 8 as well: https://github.com/adoptium/containers/issues/72

Graal

Posts with mentions or reviews of Graal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-17.
  • Java 23: The New Features Are Officially Announced
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    Contrary to what vocal Kotlin advocates might believe, Kotlin only matters on Android, and that is thanks to Google pushing it no matter what.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

    https://snyk.io/reports/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021/

    And even so, they had to conceed Android and Kotlin on their own, without the Java ecosystem aren't really much useful, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store, and currently supports OpenJDK 17 LTS on Android 12 and later devices.

    As for your question regarding numbers, mostly Java 74.6%, C++ 13.7%, on the OpenJDK, other JVM implementations differ, e.g. GraalVM is mostly Java 91.8%, C 3.6%.

    https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

    https://github.com/oracle/graal

    Two examples from many others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

  • FLaNK Stack 05 Feb 2024
    49 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
  • Apple releases Pkl – onfiguration as code language
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2024
    Pkl was built using the GraalVM Truffle framework. So it supports runtime compilation using Futurama Projections. We have been working with Apple on this for a while, and I am quite happy that we can finally read the sources!

    https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle

    Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.

  • Live Objects All the Way Down: Removing the Barriers Between Apps and VMs
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jan 2024
    That's pretty interesting. It's not as aggressive as Bee sounds, but the Espresso JVM is somewhat similar in concept. It's a full blown JVM written in Java with all the mod cons, which can either be compiled ahead of time down to memory-efficient native code giving something similar to a JVM written in C++, or run itself as a Java application on top of another JVM. In the latter mode it obviously doesn't achieve top-tier performance, but the advantage is you can easily hack on it using all the regular Java tools, including hotswapping using the debugger.

    When run like this, the bytecode interpreter, runtime system and JIT compiler are all regular Java that can be debugged, edited, explored in the IDE, recompiled quickly and so on. Only the GC is provided by the host system. If you compile it to native code, the GC is also written in Java (with some special conventions to allow for convenient direct memory access).

    What's most interesting is that Espresso isn't a direct translation of what a classical C++ VM would look like. It's built on the Truffle framework, so the code is extremely high level compared to traditional VM code. Details like how exactly transitions between the interpreter/compiled code happen, how you communicate pointer maps to the GC and so on are all abstracted away. You don't even have to invoke the JIT compiler manually, that's done for you too. The only code Espresso really needs is that which defines the semantics of the Java bytecode language and associated tools like the JDWP debugger protocol.

    https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/espresso

    This design makes it easy to experiment with new VM features that would be too difficult or expensive to implement otherwise. For example it implements full hotswap capability that lets you arbitrarily redefine code and data on the fly. Espresso can also fully self-host recursively without limit, meaning you can achieve something like what's described in the paper by running Espresso on top of Espresso.

  • Crash report and loading time
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 15 Nov 2023
    I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.
  • Quarkus 3.4 - Container-first Java Stack: Install with OpenJDK 21 and Create REST API
    7 projects | dev.to | 16 Oct 2023
    Quarkus is one of Java frameworks for microservices development and cloud-native deployment. It is developed as container-first stack and working with GraalVM and HotSpot virtual machines (VM).
  • Level-up your Java Debugging Skills with on-demand Debugging
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Oct 2023
    Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs

    And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

  • Rust vs Go: A Hands-On Comparison
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Sep 2023
    > to be compiled to a single executable is a strength that Java does not have

    I think this is very outdated claim: https://www.graalvm.org/

  • Leveraging Rust in our high-performance Java database
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
  • Java 21 makes me like Java again
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2023
    https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182

What are some alternatives?

When comparing containers and Graal you can also consider the following projects:

docker-images - Official source of container configurations, images, and examples for Oracle products and projects

Liberica JDK - Free and 100% open source Progressive Java Runtime for modern Javaâ„¢ deployments supported by a leading OpenJDK contributor

zsh-in-docker - Install Zsh, Oh-My-Zsh and plugins inside a Docker container with one line!

Adopt Open JDK - Eclipse Temurinâ„¢ build scripts - common across all releases/versions

grype - A vulnerability scanner for container images and filesystems

awesome-wasm-runtimes - A list of webassemby runtimes

Dragonfly - This repository has be archived and moved to the new repository https://github.com/dragonflyoss/Dragonfly2.

SAP Machine - An OpenJDK release maintained and supported by SAP

jetson-containers - Machine Learning Containers for NVIDIA Jetson and JetPack-L4T

maven-jpackage-template - Sample project illustrating building nice, small cross-platform JavaFX or Swing desktop apps with native installers while still using the standard Maven dependency system.

minecraft-docker

wasmer - 🚀 The leading Wasm Runtime supporting WASIX, WASI and Emscripten