The JVMCI code that Graal depends on was added to Java 9 and is inbuilt. However, all Graal and Graal-downstream projects use a custom built Java 8 release. This is also the plan for the "foreseeable future" (https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby/issues/556#issuecommen...)

It looks like a bureaucratic struggle of some kind - I wonder what's the behind the scenes story at Oracle.

Additionally, "mx" : the build system that Graal uses is fairly funky - and everyone including Chris (the engineer that made this video) is trying to get the team to move on

https://twitter.com/christhalinger/status/958824900004753408...

I wish they would use Bazel or something

Nothing, beyond the herculean effort that is to add a new JIT compiler, while keeping up everything else running without regressions.

Graal's work is well known since the days of MaxineVM.

Hopefully eventually everything will be sorted out.

For similar comparison, Microsoft is also having multiple year/releases effort with RyuJIT, .NET Native and CoreRT.

Thankfully Bazel is mostly restrained to Googleplex stuff.

It is already a pain on Android, measured in cups of coffee/tea per developer, that they went with Gradle instead of Maven.

I've use the unofficial Android Maven plugin before the official Gradle plugin was released. When the Gradle plugin came out, it made my builds so much simpler than it used to be with Maven. As much as I like XML, having 4 lines per dependency is way too much. And having to write a custom plugin every time you want some custom logic is terrible. The Maven ecosystem may have increased since then, but I'm very glad they chose Gradle over Maven.

Something awesome would be to have a S-expression to Maven XML transpiler. Parens instead of xml tags. Is there something like that?

You could do something like that with polygot-maven.

https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven