Impact of recent announcement from Oracle regarding GraalVM

[smocherla-brex]

Apologies if this has been already been discussed (I didn't find a related discussion or thread). This recent announcement from Oracle Java product team has become a source of confusion for many people (including me) on what it exactly means for users of native-image with integrations with frameworks like Micronaut.

Specifically, these parts

GraalVM Early Adopter technology, including Native Image, is being discontinued for Java SE Product customers. The goals of improving the startup time, time to peak performance, and footprint of Java programs are being pursued further in OpenJDK’s Project Leyden as a standard part of Java

The GraalVM team are transitioning to focus on non-Java Graal Languages including GraalPy and GraalJS

seems concerning as it would seem to indicate native image will seemingly not be supported (unclear what Java SE Product customers specifically entails here) and Oracle will stop investing in GraalVM for Java based languages? I'm creating this issue to get thoughts from the maintainers of Micronaut on what it means for the native image integration that comes with it. Will it continue to be supported for the foreseeable future? If so, a note or clarification will help users like me. Appreciate your response.

[sgammon]

This announcement just means that Java SE subscribers (commercially) will no longer receive Native Image support included as part of their subscription (this is the "[discontinuation]").

Native Image and other key GraalVM features aren't going anywhere. It is not deprecated or discontinued as a technology; Oracle may offer commercial support via other avenues at a later date.

The language focus on non-Java applies mostly to Truffle languages. GraalVM itself is written in Java, of course, so JVM use of GraalVM (as Micronaut uses it) is also not going away.

[thomaswue]

Yes, @sgammon is absolutely correct here. You will continue to get the instant startup and low memory footprint benefits by using native image for your Micronaut applications.