SubstrateVM Questions

[Christian Wimmer]

On 07/30/2016 05:48 AM, Sidharth Kshatriya wrote:
> Graal/Truffle with Sulong seems to be a really compelling platform to build
> a programming language! Uniquely, there are also a large number of papers
> that go into detail on how things work. Its well documented too!
>
> There is one point of concern and that is the warm up time of any
> programming language JIT built on truffle/graal. Many dynamic scripting
> languages need to start up quickly and do their job. So while long running
> scripts will do the job well I'm concerned about the merits of making a
> dynamic language port using graal/truffle with the long warmup.
>
> I learnt about SubstrateVM in which you AOT compile some code which fixes
> startup time issues. Is that something that will be available to external
> implementers? Or will this just be something for scripting engines
> "blessed" by Oracle?

Our first step will be to put Substrate VM binaries on OTN, where we 
also release Graal VM.

> Also this SubstrateVM sounds like its going to have an embedded hotspot VM
> (if I can imagine correctly). Does that have implications for any external
> party wanting to distribute their scripting engine executable?

There are no parts from the HotSpot VM inside an executable created for 
a Truffle language (or other Java application).

The build process of the executable currently runs only on the Graal VM 
(or in the future on Java 9, since we do not depend on Graal but only on 
the JVMCI API that HotSpot will have built in soon).

-Christian