Chapter 6: Truffle for Multi-language (Polyglot) support

Support for polyglot development is one of the biggest features of GraalVM. In Chapter 4, Graal Just-In-Time Compiler, and Chapter 5, Graal Ahead-of-Time Compiler and Native Image, we went into a lot of detail on how Graal optimizes code, both at build time and run time. We have only used Java in all the previous chapters. However, GraalVM extends most of its advanced features to other programming languages too. GraalVM provides a language implementation framework called Truffle Language Implementation Framework (commonly known as Truffle).

GraalVM not only provides a high-performance runtime for JVM languages such as Java, Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala, but it also supports non-JVM languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, R, WebAssembly, and LLVM languages that implement Truffle. A lot more languages are being implemented on Truffle.

This chapter provides a conceptual view of how Truffle helps guest language developers...