Foojay Podcast #82: OpenJDK Projects (Leyden, Babylon, Panama) and TornadoVM
- November 17, 2025
- 110 Unique Views
- 2 min read
In this Foojay Podcast, we're diving deep into some of the most exciting developments happening within the OpenJDK and TornadoVM projects.
At the Devoxx and JFall conferences, we spoke with several speakers and visitors about some of the major themes shaping the future of Java development. The first guest is Moritz Halbritter from the Spring Engineering team. He provides us with more insights into Project Leyden and how it's improving Java startup times through ahead-of-time compilation and profiling. We'll learn how Spring Boot developers can already take advantage of these improvements today.
Next, we'll hear from John Cecerralli at Azul about performance optimizations, the evolution from x86 to ARM64 architectures, and how OpenJDK Projects bring improvements to the JVM itself at levels we couldn't achieve before.
Then, Balkrishna Rawool will guide us through the world of vector databases and explain how Java's Vector API from Project Panama is perfectly positioned for AI use cases, despite its development beginning years before the current AI boom.
And finally, we'll meet some of the team members behind TornadoVM - Christos Kotselidis and Michalis Papadimitriou from the University of Manchester - who will explain to us how Java developers can now harness the power of GPUs for AI workloads, running large language models in pure Java without leaving the Java ecosystem. They also explain the connection between TornadoVM and the OpenJDK Project Babylon.
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Content
00:00 Introduction of topics and guests
01:58 Moritz Halbritter
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/moritz-halbritter-9301a1b1/
- Project Leyden and how it can already be used with Spring
- Difference between the approach of Project Leyden and CRaC
11:02 John Cecerralli
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-ceccarelli-95b7041/
- OpenJDK evolutions in Project Leyden
- Startup time improvements in Azul Prime
- Java performance
- ARM Graviton
17:08 Balkrishna Rawool
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/balkrishnarawool/
- Vector API, project Panama
22:44 Christos Kotselidis, Michalis Papadimitriou
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/michalis-papadimitriou/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kotselidis/
- https://www.tornadovm.org/
- https://www.tornadovm.org/gpullama3
- https://github.com/beehive-lab/TornadoVM
- TornadoVM status update, Java on GPU
- How TornadoVM relates to Project Babylon and Project Panama
33:42 Outro
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Frank Delporte is a Java Champion, Java Developer, Technical Writer at Azul, Blogger, Author of "Getting started with Java on Raspberry Pi", and Pi4J Contributor. Frank blogs about his experiments with Java and JavaFX, sometimes combined with electronic components, on the Raspberry Pi.
Vice President, Product Management at Azul Systems
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