Graal VS JDK

How does it compare to graal wasm? https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/wasm/README.md/

Java was created by James Gosling and released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It was designed with the principle of "Write Once, Run Anywhere" (WORA), enabling cross-platform compatibility through the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Over the years, Java became a leading language for enterprise applications, Android development, and large-scale backend systems. Oracle now maintains Java, with modern innovations such as Project Loom and GraalVM enhancing its performance.

Sorry, I know you weren't asking me, but for this same use case, yes, I've used a GHA build matrix with each OS/arch pair.

Cosmo/APE support would fix this, and GraalVM already ships with a Musl libc implementation, so it isn't very far off.

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/8350

It wasn’t long before I ran into several other blog posts about developers successfully using GraalVM and frameworks such as Quarkus to address this very problem. And so I’ve decided to try it out for myself.

GraalVM adds an advanced just-in-time (JIT) optimizing compiler, which is written in Java, to the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine.

You can trim down the runtime[1] but the tooling around doing this is non-existent / unreliable. Alternatively, you can generate native binaries with GraalVM[2] which comes with its own baggage (license, slow compile time, etc).

[1]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/embedded/develop-apps-platf...

[2]: https://www.graalvm.org/

Too bad it looks stuck since about a month ago (https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/8350#issuecomment-210...), needs some attention from @jart.

Really now? Now that's interesting. I thought GraalVM might be a good option in that space https://www.graalvm.org/ last I checked, but something literally called Hermetic Java has my interest piqued.

> if javac involves IR, SSA based analysis and transformation (which I assume it does)

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/jdk.compiler/...

I am fairly certain that it does not. I wrote a compiler for a simple programming language that compiled down to JVM for a project in the early 2010s. Its output was as fast as the Java one because they were fairly similar when you compared the generated bytecode. The HotSpot JVM is where all the optimization effort is applied.

Not sure how accurate/non-outdated though.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/hotspot/share...

Modern Hotspot can autovectorize at the very least.

A handler for treating .zip (and .jar and .tar ...) files as if they were a volume mounted at /home/user/foo.zip - e.g. https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/jdk-21-ga/src/java.base/...

It may be easier to reason about when thinking of the way $(mount -o loop) works with .iso files -- a file that is a container for other files that one can mount as if it were a filesystem

I was expecting pathlib in Python <https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html> to have one since a lot of Python distributions ship the standard library in .zip files but evidently not. Python gonna Python in that way

Firefox actually used to ship with that same "jar:" protocol handler, too, and I made good use of it for reading the javadoc html which was shipped inside zip files and was indescribably easier than trying to manage all the .html files in a Java 8 SDK distribution

This comment is not correct. Java uses mixed Latin1/UTF-16 strings. The Latin1 mode is for compact storage of alphanumeric text as the name suggests, but comes at a cost of dispatch to determine the encoding when selecting subsequent handling of indexing and other operations: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/1ebf2cf639300728ffc02478...

The MAX_PATH limit is annoying legacy backwards compatible stuff, but can be avoided by prefixing paths with \\?\ before passing them into the Windows API.

This is something that languages/runtimes with more effort put into portability already handle for you:

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/win...

If Python doesn't do this it's just because the sort of people who write Python don't care about Windows enough to fix it.