[dundee] Future JVM aplications

[Rick Moynihan]

> 2008/7/8 azmodie <azmodie at gmail.com>:
>>
>> with all this talk of java benchmarks etc.. I though i'd post this
>> article.
>> seems intresting enough. would this allow developers to choose the
>> language of choice.
>>
>>> Running C and Python Code on The Web
>>>
>>> Last week, Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a
>>> toolchain he's been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to
>>> be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really
>>> interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were
>>> pretty impressive.
>>
>> What do you guys think this may bring to the table ?

Yeah, it's pretty cool and indicative of the huge commercial interest
in javascript and the browser as a runtime environment.  These
toolchains are fairly common though and most languages have things
like this... For example in Java there are many ways to do this kind
of thing:

http://www.axiomsol.com/
http://nestedvm.ibex.org/
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/mlvm-dev/2008-March/000026.html

Not to mention GCC which has many different compilers etc, which can
allow languages to interoperate at the machine code level, e.g.
http://gcc.gnu.org/java/

Toolchains like this are neat, and offer big advantages but speaking
from some experience bridging between languages and runtime
environments (Java/Prolog, Java/Ruby, Java/Javascript) it's usually a
bit trickier than it looks.  And the devil is always in the details,
which often really matter!

Things get really interesting of course, when you have a meta-object
protocol to bridge between languages at runtime, allowing crazy things
like Ruby classes to inherit from a Javascript prototype which is in
turn dynamically binding to a Scala object which itself extends a Java
class!  This is the kind of thing that is becoming possible in modern
runtime environments like the JVM.  Whether it's a good idea or not is
another matter!

> 2008/7/8 christopher wyllie <cgwyllie at googlemail.com>:
> Python on the web is already becoming quite a thing is it not? I mean with
> frameworks like Django available, it's a serious contender.

Yes you're right it is a serious contender, but the subtle difference
is that it's not so much about python (or any other supported
language) on the web, but Python apps in the browser (or flash
player).  The browser of course is an altogether different place from
the server where the likes of django live.

> I'd not heard about using C on the web. I knew you could add your own
> modules in C to Apache for PHP's use(?) but using C on the web... Cool lol.

In the early days of the web, this was pretty common... but it was
madness, so CGI was born... to allow use of languages up to the job of
grokking and generating lots of text (Perl, then PHP etc...).

So, who fancies doing something crazy like running JRuby under
Tamarin?  I recon if you were insane enough you could squeeze JRuby
down that tool chain by first compiling it into java bytecode, and
then run gcj over it like this guy:

http://osdir.com/ml/lang.jruby.user/2004-07/msg00011.html

But instead output into the llvm tamarin toolchain.

I've no idea if this is possible, but it's the sort of crazy thing you
can do.  Of course, doing this without reason would be a good way to
get sectioned ;-)

R.