GraalVM Under The Covers

 At a very high level, GraalVM is a runtime that can compile bytecode into native self-contained executables as well as run programs in languages other than Java. This detailed look at it attempts to put a highly technical and difficult subject into perspective.

The starting point for this article was "Exploring Aspects of Polyglot High-Performance Virtual Machine GraalVM", a paper by M. Šipek, B. Mihaljević and A. Radovan of Rochester Institute of Technology Croatia, Zagreb, Croatia. The presents GraalVM's architecture, its features and examines how it resolves common interoperability and performance problems when having to support multiple programming languages. I've extended it in order to provide a high level overview in simple terms.

Virtual Machines were invented in order to run programs in an independent way regardless of the platform and the underlying hardware. Examples are the . NET CLR, MoarVM the modern virtual machine built for the Rakudo compiler implementing the Raku Programming Language and of course the JVM. Initially the JVM was built in order to make Java portable across platforms by running bytecode coming out of the Java compiler. Soon enough other languages that could emit bytecode for the JVM came along, like Scala, Kotlin, Groovy or Clojure, therefore extending the JVM's application beyond Java.

full article on i-programmer:

https://www.i-programmer.info/programming/java/15129-graalvm-under-the-covers.html