Five Easy Pieces For GraalVM

Ahead of time compilation has become popular and received support in major modern
frameworks. It's amazing how classic optimization plays help to color the suite of native images.
1. There are known GUI toolkits for Java. Getting them to work in native binaries isn't easy
across platforms, but it's what we expect for desktop applications.
2. Biased locking was removed from OpenJDK HotSpot JVM some time ago. This move had its
reasons, but it resulted in a number of significant performance degradations in existing code.
Thus, when non-contended locking optimization can be added, it still benefits virtual machines.
3. Parallel stop-the-world garbage collection is one of the earliest GC variants in HotSpot, and
yet it is the best choice in terms of high throughput. SubstrateVM, which powers GraalVM
Native Image, supports synchronization monitors and offers serial stop-the-world GC as a basic
collector. BellSoft recently unveiled improvements to locking and garbage collection.
Interestingly, within the GraalVM project, both were implemented in Java. We’ll look at
implementation details, benchmark results, and application benefits.
4. Micro-containers are great for cloud deployment. The smallest are based on musl. However,
development environments are often based on glibc. But today, there is a way to cross-compile
using a side toolchain.
5. In production, we need to monitor GC and the memory pools metrics. This is now possible
with existing monitoring libraries.

Presenter Dmitry Chuyko BIO

Dmitry Chuyko is a Senior Performance Architect at BellSoft, an OpenJDK committer, and a
public speaker. Prior to joining BellSoft, Dmitry worked on the Hotpot JVM at Oracle, and
before that he had many years of programming experience in Java. He is currently focused on
optimizing HotSpot for x86 and ARM, previously being involved in rolling out JEP 386, which
enables the creation of the smallest JDK containers. Dmitry continues his journey in the
containerization process and is happy to share his insights and expertise in this field.