What Drives GraalVM Adoption? Insights from the Latest Community Survey

How familiar are you with GraalVM?

65% of respondents have already deployed GraalVM in production or are considering it. Contributors represent 7.11% of the community.

How do you use GraalVM?

Building native executables with Native Image is the most popular use (40% use GraalVM as a JDK in JIT mode, a quarter integrate JavaScript, Python, and R via the Polyglot API, and 11.58% use it to build their own languages and tools).

What work are you doing?

Micro‑services are the most common application type, followed by libraries/frameworks, with desktop and command‑line apps each accounting for about one‑third of responses.

Which languages do you use with GraalVM?

Java is dominant, Kotlin is the most popular JVM language, and JavaScript and Python each attract nearly 20% of users. Python is rapidly catching up to JavaScript among non‑JVM languages.

Which technologies do you use with GraalVM?

HTTP servers/clients are used by 70% of respondents, a steep rise from ~20% in 2020. Database connections are used by 66.84%, while technologies like Apache Spark, Hadoop, and ElasticSearch see lower adoption.

Which frameworks do you use with GraalVM?

Many Java frameworks are compatible; Spring Boot usage is growing, especially with Spring Boot 3.0’s native‑image support.

What is your primary development platform?

Linux leads with 40.5% of responses, followed by Windows (24.5%) and ARM64‑based macOS (≈20%).

What is your primary deployment platform?

Cloud deployments (serverless and containers) are used by 42.1%, while desktop deployments remain popular at 22.6%.

Which IDE do you use?

IntelliJ IDEA is the clear favorite; Visual Studio Code is also widely used, and cloud‑based IDEs are gaining traction.

Which GraalVM tools do you use?

Over 70% of developers use Native Build Tools (Maven/Gradle plugins). VisualVM is used by 26.58%.

What are the biggest obstacles to adopting GraalVM?

Need more libraries for native mode (16.84%); better error/diagnostic information on compilation failures (13.16%); higher peak throughput for native executables (10.79%); more information on roadmap and stability (9.21%).

Which GraalVM version are you using?

11.05% use GraalVM Enterprise; 5% have built custom GraalVM versions.

Which Java version do you use in production?

47.7% run Java 17, and 63.5% use Java 17 or newer. Java 11 is used by 23.7%; versions older than Java 8 account for less than 1%.

Summary

This blog post shares the survey results, helping the GraalVM ecosystem understand community usage, prioritize roadmap items, and plan future improvements.