What's it all about, Alfie?

I have always hoped that GraalVM would be something that really launched Clojure, and Java, into something that would be fast - and like really fast. But then it was a licensing issue as GraalVM was licensed by Oracle, and so any production deployment was going to cost real money. But even then... for a company, that might not be bad - especially when you have to worry about performance, and you are looking at JNI, or a mixed-mode environment with C++.

So it was very interesting to me to see this article about calling Java from C++, with the GraalVM compiling Java to a shared library (and header), that could then be linked in with C++ like any other shared library.

The key is that this would completely avoid JNI, and it's complications - in coding, versioning, and execution speed. I can imagine having lots of Java code, built and tested in the normal Java way, and then compiled into a shared library for inclusion in a much more performant C++ system for those engines that had to run for long periods of time without restarts, and be very aware of resource management (memory, ports, etc.) and yet built with a simpler system than C++.

The article is interesting, but again... with the licensing, it's only really useful for organizations with revenue streams to support it.