Writing interpreters is easy, writing compilers is hard. Therefore, language implementer should only write a simple interpreter, and automatically get the benefits of compilation. We look back at ten years of research on partial evaluation in GraalVM, which started with self-optimizing AST interpreters and a novel just-in-time compiler written in Java. It resulted in a large ecosystem of language implementations that are fast, maintainable, interoperable, secure, inspectable by tools, and embeddable into various kinds of products. This is a story of successful (and not so successful) research ideas, as well as getting the research into production. But it is certainly not the end of the story: research is still continuing, and we look forward to the next decade.

Christian Wimmer is the architect of GraalVM Native Image. He was one of the first engineer of the GraalVM project, and helped growing it from a research project of Oracle Labs to a supported Oracle product. He believes that all languages should be equally fast, and that we therefore need to stop writing individual VMs and instead have one polyglot VM. His research interests span from compilers, virtual machines, and secure systems to component-based software architectures.

He received a Dr. techn. degree in Computer Science (advisor: Prof. Hanspeter Mössenböck) and a Dipl.-Ing. degree in Computer Science, both from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Before the time at Oracle, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science of the University of California, Irvine. He worked with Prof. Michael Franz at the Secure Systems and Software Laboratory on compiler optimizations, dynamic programming languages, and language-based security.