spring-native VS Graal

It was probably not a very good idea to write Lambda using Java programming language and Spring Boot Framework. Despite the well-spread usage and knowledge of this framework, the fact that Spring (Boot) heavily uses reflection and takes time to start the embedded Web Application Server led to very big cold starts which we'll explore in the next section. But now with SnapStart on AWS and GraalVM Native Image Support we have two more options how to optimize those cold starts. So let's explore how to write Lambda function using the Spring Boot. The code of this sample application (the same as for the first 3 parts but rewritten to use Spring Boot) can be found here. It provides AWS API Gateway and 2 Lambda functions: "CreateProduct" and "GetProductById". The products are stored in the Amazon DynamoDB. We'll use AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) for the infrastructure as a code.

During this experience, I was surprised to find that Spring Native doesn't support caching yet. I believe this support will be added by the community soon. In the meantime, if you're looking to start/stop your infra as fast as possible, you probably don't care about caching. Caching is made for long-lived, JVM-strong, JVM-loving apps.

fuente: https://spring.io/blog/2021/03/11/announcing-spring-native-beta

As I just found out thanks to a comment from another Redditor, spring-aot will be getting some functional configuration compile time generation support in Spring Native's next release

Not sure how far they are currently, but have you heard of Spring Native? https://spring.io/blog/2021/03/11/announcing-spring-native-beta

I have to say Spring. Because it is so mature and well-documented. Sure, it is bloated sometimes and not very well-suited for small JAR packages. And I have tried other frameworks as well, but I find that I keep returning to Spring. Especially since Spring keeps adding features that caused competing framework to have an edge over Spring, like native images with Spring Native for example.

Our next steps are : provide great Kotlin/JVM/Native (Native with Kotlin JVM via GraalVM native images) support via https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-native/, empowering multiplatform development (with Kotlin/JS frontend for example), translating Spring Boot documentation to Kotlin (via a contribution from Kotlin team), make sure that some APIs like WebTestClient currently broken with Kotlin due to some type inference bugs with recursive generic types become usable.

I doubt micronaut has better runtime performance. You're probably talking about startup time and this point is moot with either https://github.com/dsyer/spring-boot-auto-reflect Or https://spring.io/blog/2021/03/11/announcing-spring-native-beta

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

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.

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.

I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.

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).

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

> 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/

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182