GraalVM is genuinely great -- Native Image and the polyglot story are impressive.
I was put off by the earlier licensing - it was confusing, which wasn't great in a license. The GraalVM Free Terms and Conditions "GFTC" now seems better (curious if people agree?), but I wonder if it came too late.
The decoupling from Java SE was good in many ways, but it also made the future a little less clear too.
Apparently there tends to exist some attrition between both teams, now OpenJDK is having a Python and JavaScript support project, but by integrating CPython and V8, not by reaching out to GraalVM, Project Detroit.
Licensing was why I didn't adopt it, so glad to hear it's improved. Would sure love a non-custom license though. Will have to dive deeper into the GFTC
Just in case you were unaware, there is and was a 100% open source variant of the GraalVM referred to as the "Community Edition (CE)"¹. RedHat built their own distribution based on that source tree called Mandrel². The closed source version is faster in many cases, but the CE release in very capable.
I was put off by the earlier licensing - it was confusing, which wasn't great in a license. The GraalVM Free Terms and Conditions "GFTC" now seems better (curious if people agree?), but I wonder if it came too late.
The decoupling from Java SE was good in many ways, but it also made the future a little less clear too.