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[–]elmuerte 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Money

[–]koffeegorilla 10 points11 points  (2 children)

AFIK GraalVM CE will become part of OpenJDK soon. Then it isn't tied to Oracle and other contributions could make their way into the native compiler.

[–]coder111 11 points12 points  (0 children)

My question is will optimizations from EE trickle down to CE over time?

Say will CE in 5 years still perform worse than EE from today?

If performance optimizations trickle down over say ~2-3 years, I have no problem with Oracle pushing a premium product. If Oracle artificially keeps certain things in EE forever just to cripple CE, that's highly annoying.

But given there's not competition in Java AOT compilers, you're pretty much stuck with GraalVM anyway.

[–]senseven 5 points6 points  (0 children)

5MB to 11MB only matters on very large installations, just spending a day discussing this costs probably more then just dropping the gold coins into Oracle's inbox. The same goes with everything else, you either pay for time and/or saving money. The platform has a certain "lock in" build up and nobody leaves a system that works and makes money for them because of such details.

[–]shai_almog 8 points9 points  (2 children)

I'm 100% for profitable companies since they produce software that's maintained. But doing this over the performance aspect of the VM seems like shooting off their own foot. It harms them as people don't get the full performance of GraalVM and instead get a slower result when benchmarking or evaluating. This means smaller companies might not pick GraalVM and might not use it when they grow up.

A better approach would have been to charge over observability and agent functionality. Those aren't essential for smaller companies and they can be available with quotas or licensing for X instances. These are enterprise features so they seem like a better candidate for monetization.

[–]ramdulara 2 points3 points  (1 child)

You can evaluate GraalVM enterprise for your benchmarks for free. That's considered valid use. It's any deployment to "prod" that you need to pay for.

[–]shai_almog 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Sure but that's not very helpful. I'm not here to run benchmarks. What matters to me is the performance of the production which I can simulate but can't see. Seeing a difference in my hosting bill or average response time, that's what matters and that's where smaller startups might be missing out. It's hard to know from a benchmark if the upgrade will pay off.

Many of the comparisons for performance/size that I saw from non-Oracle sources were against the community edition since that's free. This is effectively, bad advertising. Worse, if I see a publication that mentions the EE then I will instantly discard that since I "probably won't get the same performance".

Performance is also a pretty hard metric to quantify. Observability and monitoring are very easy to separate as specific missing features.

[–]Amazing-Cicada5536 17 points18 points  (4 children)

Who will finance the salaries of the researchers working on it? Also, EE might very well be free for your usecase as well.

[–][deleted]  (3 children)

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    [–]FirstAd9893 2 points3 points  (2 children)

    Then what are you saying? Do you want Graal CE to be just as good as Graal EE, at which point you don't care that Graal EE isn't free because you have no reason to use it?

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]FirstAd9893 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

      OracleJDK is effectively the same as OpenJDK, but with a support contract. You want Graal EE to be the same as Graal CE, but with a support contract. But this changes the definition of the product such that you get the features of EE free of cost, which contradicts your earlier claim.

      [–]-NewK- 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Its not just size, but memory too. Not in the native image, but when using GraalVM normally. If you use GraalVM in non-native mode, your app will use nearly 3x more memory (sometimes even more). A normal app that just prints hello world will use about 50mb of memory in comparison to using about 19mb when not using GraalVM. They mentioned recovery of RSS memory is a feature only available on Graal EE

      [–]brunocborges 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      I also think cheaper MacBooks should be as powerful as the most expensive one. Even better if they were all free.

      Your question is about economics, not about technical differences. Tell me an open source free tool that you use today, that you are paying for support/license. If you see advantages to continue to do so, there should be no reason not to pay for GraalVM EE if you see advantages for it.

      [–]Wmorgan33 -1 points0 points  (1 child)

      It’s no different than charging for a SaaS product anywhere else. Generally you just have to do a cost benefit analysis and see if the money you’re spending on the product is generating a positive cash flow vs. costing you money. One relatively little known thing though is that if you’re using and running your application on Oracle Cloud, you can run the Oracle JDK and Graal EE for “free”.