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> I was surprised Sun/Oracle's JVM (or Apple, after their 3rd architecture migration) never took a page from AS/400's TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Inter

> I was surprised Sun/Oracle's JVM (or Apple, after their 3rd architecture migration) never took a page from AS/400's TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) and compile an architecture-independent representation to native code at installation time. GraalVM supports AOT compilation – https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image/ https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image... But, I think "TIMI" has significantly less value today than it once did. Due to PASE (the AIX compatibility environment), there is ever more code on contemporary IBM i systems which runs outside of the MI bytecode layer. Shifting IBM i to something other than POWER would require recompiling all that code from source.

sillywalk 3y ago
Beyond recompiling, wouldn't porting 'i' to another architecture, say x86-64 or ARM64, would require the addition some sort of PowerPC AS tags active mode - instructions to set the "this is a valid pointer bits" ?
- skissane 3y ago
  ARM already has tagged memory support - https://source.android.com/docs/security/test/memory-safety/arm-mte https://source.android.com/docs/security/test/memory-safety/... - although I don’t know if it is sufficiently equivalent to the PowerPC AS feature. And then ARM also has CHERI / Morello, which is still at the research prototype stage, but may be production ready in a few more years