I recently worked with GraalVM's Truffle language implementation framework. I wanted to write a tutorial about it, as I've found the existing explanations of how it works difficult to follow (I had to piece a lot of information from different sources to get the whole picture). Since it's a very large topic, I'm breaking it up into multiple parts. In the first installment, I want to explain exactly what Truffle and Graal is, and how they work together to help you easily create a high-performance implementation of a programming language.