GraalVM Native Image combines static analysis, heap snapshotting, and ahead-of-time compilation to produce a highly optimized standalone executable for a Java application. In this talk, we first introduce the overall architecture of GraalVM Native Image: instead of “just” compiling Java bytecode ahead of time, it also initializes part of the application at build time. This reduces the startup time and memory footprint of the application at run time.

In the second part of the talk, we dive into details of the points-to analysis. We show which of our original research ideas worked or did not work when analyzing large production applications; and we show the benefits of tightly integrating the static analysis with the ahead-of-time compiler.

Christian Wimmer is the architect of GraalVM Native Image. He was one of the first engineer of the GraalVM project, and helped growing it from a research project of Oracle Labs to a supported Oracle product. He believes that all languages should be equally fast, and that we therefore need to stop writing individual VMs and instead have one polyglot VM. His research interests span from compilers, virtual machines, and secure systems to component-based software architectures.

He received a Dr. techn. degree in Computer Science (advisor: Prof. Hanspeter Mössenböck) and a Dipl.-Ing. degree in Computer Science, both from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Before the time at Oracle, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science of the University of California, Irvine. He worked with Prof. Michael Franz at the Secure Systems and Software Laboratory on compiler optimizations, dynamic programming languages, and language-based security.