Pure rumors: Is Sun working on a language independent JVM?
The following snippet in CNet News caught my eye:
And there's potential that Sun also could be more accommodating of C#, Microsoft's .Net analog to the Java language. Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos said Sun is examining modified virtual machine software that can run other languages besides Java. The initial focus is on scripting languages, but other options include Fortran and C, and there's "no barrier" to a virtual machine that could run C#, he said. "The virtual machine is capable of executing more."
Interesting. Which also somewhat confirms my long-term prediction that JVM will natively run .NET applications let's say five years from now... (and viceversa?).
Comments
- Anonymous
May 16, 2005
vicecersa?
Well it's possible at the moment via IKVM virtual machine (IVKM is a Java virtual machine / bytecode converter for .Net)
http://www.ikvm.net/ - Anonymous
May 16, 2005
I knew about IKVM but I don't view it as a native implementation of Java under CLI. I was thinking of a runtime that handles both MSIL and Java Bytecode natively... i.e. both binary representations being "first-class" citizens. - Anonymous
May 16, 2005
Yes - Anonymous
May 17, 2005
There is a nice list of programming languages for the JVM, maintained by Prof. R. Tolksdorf:
http://www.robert-tolksdorf.de/vmlanguages.html - Anonymous
May 19, 2005
I saw that list too.
But standard C and C++ are not there yet. I presume that you need some deeper changes in JVM to make the Java Bytecode work with pointers, and random conversion between them. This is necessary to do things like forced casting between scalar values to/from pointers. Of course, what you lose in that case is the type safety, and verifiable data access.