This looks very interesting, but the lack of comments here makes me wonder if it's being oversold a bit in the article? It sound like the Borg of languages, resistance is futile and future languages will be assimilated - at least languages that can bear the memory overhead of the system?
It is very definitely being oversold, almost to a ridiculous extent. Its also very weird that they named their project Polyglot when there is already an extensible compiler framework named Polyglot ( https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/polyglot/ ) that has already been used to make dozens of languages used in published research.
The fundamental technology really is that impressive, the catch is that everything is a research project and not yet battle-tested. Also SubstrateVM is pretty important for usability but it isn't open source yet.
There’s one final catch worth knowing about. I said at the start I wanted everything I listed to be open source. Graal & Truffle are huge and very expensive endeavours written by skilled people who don’t come cheap. As a result, only some parts of what I’ve described are fully open source.
These bits are open and can be found on github or other repositories:
Graal & Truffle themselves.
The pluggable version of HotSpot they rely on.
RubyTruffle
Sulong (LLVM bitcode support)
The R, Python 3 and Lua implementations (some of these are hobby/research projects).
And these things are not open source:
TruffleC/ManagedC
TruffleJS/NodeJS API support
SubstrateVM
AOT support
TruffleJS can be downloaded for free as part of the GraalVM preview releases. I don’t know how to play with TruffleC or ManagedC, although as Sulong implements some of their functionality, it may not matter much.
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And these things are not open source: TruffleJS can be downloaded for free as part of the GraalVM preview releases. I don’t know how to play with TruffleC or ManagedC, although as Sulong implements some of their functionality, it may not matter much.