Ted Leung on the air : It's Richard Kelsey week

Ted Leung on the air
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Fri, 01 Aug 2003

Patrick Logan weighed in with another Richard Kelsey paper (I started on Wednesday). Not only that, he called into question the use of virtual machines at all.

Virtual machines get you portability, the ability to do JIT compilation (although this could be done in native code apps), and security (via sandboxes, etc). It seems to me that the portability argument is getting weaker. I'm interested in a open source modern language (define that however you want). If I have to generate native code then it seems to me that for the environments that I care about the only ISA's that matter are x86, debatably Power/PowerPC, Itanium, and ARM (PDA's and phones). Do we still need virtual machines? It's an interesting question.

[01:09] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 2 Comments |

I think the issue is larger than byte-codes vs. native ISA. Ted Neward did a JVM vs. CLI presentation at PNSS where he used the term "managed environment" to refer to these environments which do more than just insulate you from the ISA, but also provide a large set of standard APIs along with that. Consider that many large organizations have found value in Java client deployments not because they need to support non-Wintel machines within their organization, but because deploying a Win32 app across 95/98/Me/2k/XP is significantly more challenging than deploying a Java app across those same set of platforms.
Posted by Wilhelm at Fri Aug 1 10:34:50 2003

But the managed environment is beyond the VM. If you look at the JVM spec, it only talks about basic type info, not a runtime library. For modern languages (the context of the post), I expect a sizable library. I don't really thing that a large or portable library is really a function of a VM approach to language implemenation. After all, a large portion of the Java libs or CLR/Mono libs are written in bytecode.
Posted by Ted Leung at Fri Aug 1 14:25:06 2003

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