GraalPy – A high-performance embeddable Python 3 runtime for Java

In case someone is interested, here are some benchmark results comparing GraalPy and others with JDK8 using the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stefan-marr.de&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;awfy-bun.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stefan-marr.de&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;awfy-bun.html</a><p>And here is a table representation of all benchmarks and the geomean and median overall results: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;software.rochus-keller.ch&#x2F;awfy-bun-summary.ods" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;software.rochus-keller.ch&#x2F;awfy-bun-summary.ods</a><p>The implementation of the same benchmark suite runs around factor 2.4 (geomean) faster on JDK8 than on GraalPython EE 22.3 Hotspot, or 41 times faster than CPython 3.11. GraalPython is thus about 17 times faster than CPython, and about two times faster than PyPy. The Graal Enterprise Edition (EE) seem to be factor 1.31 faster than the Community Edition (CE).

Tried to use graalvm (interpreter) to run a fairly large project at my $dayjob$ and ran into a few issues right away.<p><pre><code> - Maturin doesn&#x27;t support the graal interpreter, so no Py03 packages - uv doesn&#x27;t seem to run, as `fork` and `execve` are missing from the os package? - Graal seems to have a huge number of patches to popular libraries so that they&#x27;ll run, most seem to be of the form that patch c files to add additional IFDEFs </code></pre> I don&#x27;t think Graal is going to be a viable target for large projects with a huge set of dependencies unfortunately, as the risk of not being able to upgrade to different versions or add newer dependencies is going to be too high.<p>It&#x27;s impressive what it does seem to support though, and probably worth looking at if you have a smaller scale project.

I guess what makes Python interesting right now is the integration with ML toolchains, CUDA, Metal&#x2F;MLX, pytorch, tensorflow, LLM encoders&#x2F;decoders, etc. more than Python the language. But can GraalVM run those codes meaningfully when Python is merely used for glue code with the important bits implemented in native code?

OP here.<p>More details about this particular release are in the blog post at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;graalvm&#x2F;whats-new-in-graal-languages-24-1-b2452c9debae" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;graalvm&#x2F;whats-new-in-graal-languages-24-1...</a><p>Happy to answer any additional questions!

FWIW we&#x27;ve had full Java&#x2F;Python integration in Clojure for awhile now, courtesy of Chris Neurnberger and libpython-clj: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clj-python&#x2F;libpython-clj">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clj-python&#x2F;libpython-clj</a><p>If you&#x27;re into that sort of thing.<p>Self-interest disclosure: I&#x27;m a major contributor and heavy user.

DuckDB is not currently a supported package, but Pandas and matplotlib are which is good. If DuckDB and Polars were supported and if they ran well, I suspect many data jobs could benefit.

Took a little digging to find that it targets 3.11. Didn’t see anything about a GIL. If you’re a Python person, don’t click the quick start link unless you want to look at some xml.

An honorific. So much of this dynamic language performance improvement on the Graal JVM was proven out by Chris Seaton.<p>May he rest in peace.

What is the use-case for GraalPy? To be honest I don&#x27;t understand why would anyone want to use it.

Does it have to be run in a GraalVM, or any JVM implementation is fine?

Could this directly invoke Java (or Scala) functions without using a bridge? If so this would be great for programs that use spark -- UDFs would become performant enough to consider using on medium-to-large dataframes.

HPy can eventually be used to support CPython extension modules in GraalPy

Am Internet point for the first working demo with django + postgres.

GraalVM is fascinating. Honest question: what are Oracle&#x27;s plan for it? How does it serve them?

I&#x27;m very skeptical about production use, but the thought of Oracle taking over Python is amusing, since the Python community is already run like Oracle in a top down military manner. It can only get better!

Is there a way to embed Python 3 into Swift like this?

what&#x27;s the advantage of this over JPype?

What does that mean for Clojure?