Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

The Oracle flavors of the JVM/JDK probably scare too many away with regards to redistribution of their product. That coupled with the fact that things like the AOT engine is closed source and the weight of the JVM for anything besides daemons (both mentioned towards the end of the article) probably keep language designers away these days.

I would love a lightweight toolkit that made for easy language development. VMKit[0] is dead, MicroVM[1] is a nice idea but not full fledged. Many like myself looking to implement a toy language would love to be fast out of the gate and would rather not mess with the OS-specific constructs and specifics of LLVM IR. So we end up cross-compiling to existing languages or marrying ourselves to a certain runtime (e.g. the CLR). Any other lightweight VMs or AOT compilers that are cross-platform that language designers can use these days?

0 - http://vmkit.llvm.org/ 1 - http://microvm.github.io/

QBE[1] seems to be what you're looking for. It "aims to be a pure C embeddable backend that provides 70% of the performance of advanced compilers in 10% of the code".

Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527

[1]: http://c9x.me/compile/

Neat, I missed this when originally posted. Sadly, it falls apart on the "cross-platform" requirement (does not appear to support Windows).

Graal/Truffle is not a proprietary part of the JDK, i.e. it's also part of OpenJDK. The article mentions this.

Some tangential things mentioned are proprietary though.

I think we should start to see post-Java9 a less resource intensive JVM, even more so with Java10. The problem boils down to if there exists an alternative ecosystem that is going to be as featureful and as powerful in the meantime. I am bullish on Oracle here, as much as I hate to say it

yeah java9/10/11 stuff is probably a little bit late.

Yeah, the problem is that it will only appear around 2020 and meanwhile the competion doesn't stand still.

Also we still have deployments using EOL Java versions that don't get upgraded, because IT doesn't want to change those servers.

Also sometime back there use to be OpenJDK maxine VM project which is gone and now an option of closed source SubstrateVM appeared.

It may be unlikely but Oracle can simply remove highly paid staff from above mentioned projects and put in some closed source alternative/analogous projects. Open source project may then be left to rot. As it is almost every single developer on Graal etc is Oracle labs or Oracle funded research group at university.

check out RPython.

I should have mentioned one of my wants was a pluggable type system. Maybe not a full type inferencing component (that would be nice!) but at least static typing at the IR level.

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