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I think VMs are the future of application programming, especially as manufacturers become more amenable to using "unconventional" architectures like ARM to host

I think VMs are the future of application programming, especially as manufacturers become more amenable to using "unconventional" architectures like ARM to host full-featured computers. LLVM, the JVM and the CLR all have benefits- I don't see any reason to believe there will be a convergence in the near future. Environments like .Net and the JVM stack will slowly allow tighter and finer-grained interoperability of the languages they host. We currently have class-level blending of languages, and in the future we will probably see method-level blending. The best DSL for the job.

silentbicycle 16y ago
Those VM designs are pretty heavily skewed towards class-based OO languages, though. Most VMs have some kind of behavior (polymorphic method lookup, unification, message-passing) that they do very efficiently because of the language they target, but others are omitted. For example, it isn't possible to do real tail-call optimization on the JVM without a trampoline, AFAIK. If it had been created for (say) ML, TCO would be a given, but OO stuff would be an afterthought. The Erlang VM is another interesting platform, albeit one heavily skewed towards fault tolerance, concurrency, message passing, etc.
- dataangel 16y ago
  LLVM is not skewed that way.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Very true.