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I'm talking about getting academia onboarded back in 1996 here. If you look at the industrial market, then sure, but I'm looking at what it takes to get languag

by jlouis 11y ago

I'm talking about getting academia onboarded back in 1996 here. If you look at the industrial market, then sure, but I'm looking at what it takes to get languages that doesn't look like the normal imperative piece of crap to run on the JVM, and without tail-calls that is just hoop-jumping. As for the GC, the interplay is the ability to tell the runtime where your pointers are. It is one of the places which usually lacks because many VMs assume a calling convention, like the one in Java, say. The JVM is a bit better here as it uses a stack-based engine, and as such is somewhat simpler to handle. Functional compilers rarely, if ever, uses the standard conventions for handling this. Especially if they want to avoid boxing polymorphic parameters, and expand them for speed. We could have had far better client-side and academic penetration of the JVM by now, had Sun played their cards differently. But alas, they didn't, and we are stuck with a Server VM market only.

MichaelGG 11y ago
While I'm sympathetic to bashing non-functional stuff, the JVM holds the record for languages. The CLR got the tail call thing partially right (AFAIK they didn't work well and weren't guaranteed) but due to the Windows only aspect MS chose, got almost no 3rd party language support. The client side issue was much more to do with the terrible UI stuff and insistence on cross platform (hint: actual end users rarely care about cross platform since they tended to only run one platform at any time.) I believe MS was particularity enamored with Java but Sun slapped them away. Client side was not lost due to lack of functional support. This should be trivially verifiable by the fact that fp is still only lightly used in industry.
pron 11y ago
When you say academia you mean academic PL research, which makes up a very small portion of CS academia. Most CS people care about FP just as much as the industry does, and the JVM is quite popular in the algorithmic fields (maybe not as much as C, but more than any other managed runtime). Aside from tail-calls (which will come once people really ask for them), the JVM is about to have pretty much everything functional languages can ever need (value types and excellent box-elision), and the new JIT (Graal) is the biggest breakthrough in compiler technology in the last decade or so. PL academics are drooling over it. ECOOP had a full-day workshop dedicated just to Graal. And you don't want to change calling conventions, because language interoperability is one of the JVM's greatest strengths. Here it is running JS, R and C, in the same REPL with Graal: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/292832/useR_multilang_demo.mp4 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/292832/useR_multilang_de...

by jlouis 11y ago

MichaelGG 11y ago

While I'm sympathetic to bashing non-functional stuff, the JVM holds the record for languages. The CLR got the tail call thing partially right (AFAIK they didn't work well and weren't guaranteed) but due to the Windows only aspect MS chose, got almost no 3rd party language support. The client side issue was much more to do with the terrible UI stuff and insistence on cross platform (hint: actual end users rarely care about cross platform since they tended to only run one platform at any time.) I believe MS was particularity enamored with Java but Sun slapped them away. Client side was not lost due to lack of functional support. This should be trivially verifiable by the fact that fp is still only lightly used in industry.

pron 11y ago

When you say academia you mean academic PL research, which makes up a very small portion of CS academia. Most CS people care about FP just as much as the industry does, and the JVM is quite popular in the algorithmic fields (maybe not as much as C, but more than any other managed runtime). Aside from tail-calls (which will come once people really ask for them), the JVM is about to have pretty much everything functional languages can ever need (value types and excellent box-elision), and the new JIT (Graal) is the biggest breakthrough in compiler technology in the last decade or so. PL academics are drooling over it. ECOOP had a full-day workshop dedicated just to Graal. And you don't want to change calling conventions, because language interoperability is one of the JVM's greatest strengths. Here it is running JS, R and C, in the same REPL with Graal: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/292832/useR_multilang_demo.mp4 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/292832/useR_multilang_de...