GraalVM vs Laravel Homestead

GraalVM vs Laravel Homestead: What are the differences?

Developers describe GraalVM as "A universal virtual machine for running applications (by Oracle)". An ecosystem and shared runtime offering performance advantages not only to JVM-based languages such as Java, Scala, Groovy, and Kotlin, but also to programming languages as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and R. Additionally, it enables the execution of native code on the JVM via LLVM front-end. On the other hand, Laravel Homestead is detailed as "The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box)". Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

GraalVM and Laravel Homestead can be primarily classified as "Virtual Machine" tools.

Some of the features offered by GraalVM are:

• Polyglot - Zero overhead interoperability between programming languages allows you to write polyglot applications and select the best language for your task
• Native - Native images compiled with GraalVM ahead-of-time improve the startup time and reduce the memory footprint of JVM-based applications
• Embeddable - GraalVM can be embedded in both managed and native applications. There are existing integrations into OpenJDK, Node.js, Oracle Database, and MySQL

On the other hand, Laravel Homestead provides the following key features:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• PHP 5.6
• HHVM

GraalVM and Laravel Homestead are both open source tools. GraalVM with 9.57K GitHub stars and 606 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Laravel Homestead with 3.14K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks.