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Comment by kodfodrasz | Hacker News Reader

I also prefer the CIL and also the C# language to Java (though I really like Java and its ecosystem), but we have to admit that MS had 5-10 years to learn from the Java design decisions and their effects, and still did not manage to overcome every problematic point :)

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They also had difference purposes driving their design, and we should not forget that.

JVM - Bytecodes only for Java

CIL - Bytecodes for VB.NET, C#, Managed C++ and the 1.0 SDK contained examples for Lisp, Pascal, Eiffel, Ada, ....

Of course, history then took another path for the JVM.

EDIT: Forgot that C++/CLI replaced Managed C++, which was the C++ variant on 1.0.

> JVM - Bytecodes only for Java

Although it should be mentioned that java language semantics are largely (depending on how you measure them :-) absent from the jvm. (Default methods were a very unusual change in that respect)

And, as you say, subsequent history has weirdly inverted the JVM and CIL. The former is a lot less 'J' and the latter is a lot less 'C' ;-)

I would bet that there's a lot higher rate of .NET users running VB.NET than there are JVM users running Scala/Clojure/Kotlin. They just don't tend to be the sort to post to Hacker News.

Although this might really be true, I am skeptical that this has something to do with the inherent design of the Java bytecode compared to the CIL.

But there are probably more CPUs running non-java JVM languages ;-) It all depends what you count, as usual.

(I was really referring to the healthy non-java jvm language community. JRuby, Scala, and Clojure have lively communities and commercial backing)

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