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Why, exactly? Will the impact (if any) on android change those languages? I can't see how. Those fretting about "Oracle's stewardship of Java" all need to ta

Why, exactly? Will the impact (if any) on android change those languages? I can't see how. Those fretting about "Oracle's stewardship of Java" all need to take a breath. Honestly, things can't be worse than they were under Sun -- except perhaps in the eyes of those that make platform decisions based on the patent-management policies of multinational corporations. If FUD or "morale" or "community" is the chief concern for others, then they've forgotten the lessons of Java's history: i.e. the shit keeps hitting the fan in different ways, yet code running on JVMs is everywhere, and that'll continue to be the case for decades. Anyway, I honestly can't see how this has any bearing on "userspace" as it were. If I were a VM vendor, I'd be very concerned, but application and library developers would seem to be entirely unaffected by the suit.

DougBTX 16y ago
> Why, exactly? Imagine you are developing a new language to run on the JVM, and it turns out that to get a 10x performance improvement, it would be really great to have this new bytecode instruction added to the JVM. To get it into every JVM, you would have to go through Oracle anyway, so nothing changes there. But if you wanted to distribute your own variation, a hypothetical openJVM+, Oracle is saying that they may well go after you with patent suits. Good for people happy with the current JVM, looking for stability. Bad for people wanting to bring innovations to the JVM without explicit consent from Oracle.
- cemerick 16y ago
  Bollocks. People in the alternative JVM language space have been hankering for all sorts of VM changes/additions for years, including TCO, fixnums, method handles, continuations, etc etc etc. How many openJVM+ implementations have ever been implemented, nevermind used out in the world? None, AFAIK -- the progress, as it is, happens in the MLVM, which is under the umbrella of OpenJDK. So as I said, the exceptions to this might be highly VM vendors, such as Azul, GAE, and various people that have worked on (maybe deployed, I don't know?) full-stack Java operating systems and/or Java-on-a-chip (for embedded applications I suppose). Anyone developing applications, libraries, et al. are entirely unaffected AFAICT.

DougBTX 16y ago

> Why, exactly? Imagine you are developing a new language to run on the JVM, and it turns out that to get a 10x performance improvement, it would be really great to have this new bytecode instruction added to the JVM. To get it into every JVM, you would have to go through Oracle anyway, so nothing changes there. But if you wanted to distribute your own variation, a hypothetical openJVM+, Oracle is saying that they may well go after you with patent suits. Good for people happy with the current JVM, looking for stability. Bad for people wanting to bring innovations to the JVM without explicit consent from Oracle.

cemerick 16y ago
Bollocks. People in the alternative JVM language space have been hankering for all sorts of VM changes/additions for years, including TCO, fixnums, method handles, continuations, etc etc etc. How many openJVM+ implementations have ever been implemented, nevermind used out in the world? None, AFAIK -- the progress, as it is, happens in the MLVM, which is under the umbrella of OpenJDK. So as I said, the exceptions to this might be highly VM vendors, such as Azul, GAE, and various people that have worked on (maybe deployed, I don't know?) full-stack Java operating systems and/or Java-on-a-chip (for embedded applications I suppose). Anyone developing applications, libraries, et al. are entirely unaffected AFAICT.