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The Oracle flavors of the JVM/JDK probably scare too many away with regards to redistribution of their product. That coupled with the fact that things like the

The Oracle flavors of the JVM/JDK probably scare too many away with regards to redistribution of their product. That coupled with the fact that things like the AOT engine is closed source and the weight of the JVM for anything besides daemons (both mentioned towards the end of the article) probably keep language designers away these days. I would love a lightweight toolkit that made for easy language development. VMKit[0] is dead, MicroVM[1] is a nice idea but not full fledged. Many like myself looking to implement a toy language would love to be fast out of the gate and would rather not mess with the OS-specific constructs and specifics of LLVM IR. So we end up cross-compiling to existing languages or marrying ourselves to a certain runtime (e.g. the CLR). Any other lightweight VMs or AOT compilers that are cross-platform that language designers can use these days? 0 - http://vmkit.llvm.org/ http://vmkit.llvm.org/ 1 - http://microvm.github.io/ http://microvm.github.io/

the8472 10y ago
Graal/Truffle is not a proprietary part of the JDK, i.e. it's also part of OpenJDK. The article mentions this. Some tangential things mentioned are proprietary though.
geodel 10y ago
Also sometime back there use to be OpenJDK maxine VM project which is gone and now an option of closed source SubstrateVM appeared. It may be unlikely but Oracle can simply remove highly paid staff from above mentioned projects and put in some closed source alternative/analogous projects. Open source project may then be left to rot. As it is almost every single developer on Graal etc is Oracle labs or Oracle funded research group at university.
Scarbutt 10y ago
check out RPython.
- kodablah 10y ago
  I should have mentioned one of my wants was a pluggable type system. Maybe not a full type inferencing component (that would be nice!) but at least static typing at the IR level.
mahmoudimus 10y ago
I think we should start to see post-Java9 a less resource intensive JVM, even more so with Java10. The problem boils down to if there exists an alternative ecosystem that is going to be as featureful and as powerful in the meantime. I am bullish on Oracle here, as much as I hate to say it
- merb 10y ago
  yeah java9/10/11 stuff is probably a little bit late.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Yeah, the problem is that it will only appear around 2020 and meanwhile the competion doesn't stand still. Also we still have deployments using EOL Java versions that don't get upgraded, because IT doesn't want to change those servers.
frankpf 10y ago
QBE[1] seems to be what you're looking for. It "aims to be a pure C embeddable backend that provides 70% of the performance of advanced compilers in 10% of the code". Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527 [1]: http://c9x.me/compile/ http://c9x.me/compile/
- kodablah 10y ago
  Neat, I missed this when originally posted. Sadly, it falls apart on the "cross-platform" requirement (does not appear to support Windows).
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the8472 10y ago

Graal/Truffle is not a proprietary part of the JDK, i.e. it's also part of OpenJDK. The article mentions this. Some tangential things mentioned are proprietary though.

geodel 10y ago

Also sometime back there use to be OpenJDK maxine VM project which is gone and now an option of closed source SubstrateVM appeared. It may be unlikely but Oracle can simply remove highly paid staff from above mentioned projects and put in some closed source alternative/analogous projects. Open source project may then be left to rot. As it is almost every single developer on Graal etc is Oracle labs or Oracle funded research group at university.

Scarbutt 10y ago

check out RPython.

kodablah 10y ago
I should have mentioned one of my wants was a pluggable type system. Maybe not a full type inferencing component (that would be nice!) but at least static typing at the IR level.

mahmoudimus 10y ago

I think we should start to see post-Java9 a less resource intensive JVM, even more so with Java10. The problem boils down to if there exists an alternative ecosystem that is going to be as featureful and as powerful in the meantime. I am bullish on Oracle here, as much as I hate to say it

merb 10y ago
yeah java9/10/11 stuff is probably a little bit late.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Yeah, the problem is that it will only appear around 2020 and meanwhile the competion doesn't stand still. Also we still have deployments using EOL Java versions that don't get upgraded, because IT doesn't want to change those servers.

frankpf 10y ago

QBE[1] seems to be what you're looking for. It "aims to be a pure C embeddable backend that provides 70% of the performance of advanced compilers in 10% of the code". Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527 [1]: http://c9x.me/compile/ http://c9x.me/compile/

kodablah 10y ago
Neat, I missed this when originally posted. Sadly, it falls apart on the "cross-platform" requirement (does not appear to support Windows).
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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