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Twitter’s Quest for a Wholly Graal Runtime by Chris Thalinger

Scala Days Conferences · 3.2K views · 2018-09-21 · 50:11

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Overview

Chris Thalinger of Twitter describes the company's effort to run its Scala services on the Graal JIT compiler at Scala Days NYC 2018. It covers the performance gains Twitter saw and the work of running Graal in production.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as public evidence that Twitter ran GraalVM in production and saw significant performance improvements.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2019–2019

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisFunctional programmingSoftware performance & optimization
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What people said

walkingolof · 2019-12 · Reference

>If you are a startup then Scala isn't a good fit. FAANG don't need to use Scala because.... Not a FANG, but close, Twitter is a huge Scala shop and was one of the first to run Scala workloads on GraalVM in production. Twitter’s Quest for a Wholly Graal Runtime by Chris Thalinger: [VIDEO]

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luu · 2019-06 · Reference

It seems pretty good. Twitter has some talks on this where they claim signifiant performance improvements: [VIDEO] . I've heard that the Twitter JVM team has a road show where they've talked to some other large Scala users about the performance improvements. Initially, people are highly skeptical of the claims, but after trying Graal on their internal workloads, they generally see similar results. Here's a paper which has some explanations for why you might expect Graal to improve Scala performance: [LINK]

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tom_mellior · 2019-05 · Reference

> They are not "advertising a commercial license". [LINK] "GraalVM Enterprise is available for purchase and is free on Oracle Cloud." > They are saying NOT to use the Enterprise version in production [citation needed] > The only reference I've ever seen to Twitter using GraalVM in production is in this discussion thread. Considering that Twitter has been talking about this in public for some time, this statement is unlikely to make the point you were trying to make: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Scala Days Conferences, played through YouTube.

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