GraalVM Review
June 28, 2020

GraalVM Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

GraalVM Community

Overall Satisfaction with GraalVM

We are experimenting to use GraalVM in the context of serverless framework usage. The core issues that it addresses are image size and process start-up time, especially in the cold start scenarios. Another area of interest is in densification of the container images that we run on container clusters to save overall cost.

Pros

  • Ahead-of-time compiled native images which start up faster
  • Javascript application run on top of it without need for V8 engine.
  • Java libraries can be accessed from other programming languages.

Cons

  • JIT compiler makes a long-running server process run even faster as time passes with optimization at runtime. Lack of this feature makes GraalVM not suited for certain applications
  • All the libraries are not easily available or compiled down to GraalVM binary. Manual Involvement is needed to make some libraries work. Reflection-based libraries specifically do not work.
  • There are runtime surprises in some cases and increases support needs
  • The cost of running a serverless application can be managed if planned correctly. Interoperability between languages
  • Cognitive load on the team increases
  • Support cost and alternate trouble shooting tools need

Do you think GraalVM delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with GraalVM's feature set?

Yes

Did GraalVM live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GraalVM go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GraalVM again?

Yes

Microservices development and Serverless application development is an area GraalVM helps well--Especially for smaller binary footprint and faster start-up time. Another appropriate area is running docker containers on an orchestration platform such as K8S or ECS. It's also good for scenarios where alternate JVM languages need to be mixed and used and to run heavy memory usage javascript applications.

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