yes, and implementing things like tail call recursion requires major kludge. But, albeit we could discuss about stack based vs register based VM instruction se

yes, and implementing things like tail call recursion requires major kludge. But, albeit we could discuss about stack based vs register based VM instruction set design, some of the limitations of the JVM are not inherent to its design, but rather to the inability to evolve. Who's going to introduce bytecode extensions to the JVM now? And correctly manage the upgrades, backward compatibility process etc. Mature products sometimes have this kind of issues. But, who knows, perhaps there will be a time frame when such a change will be welcome (along with java7 closures?) by the community, even if causing some migration problems.