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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Google should switch to C# and Mono. Besides giving them a better language and VM, it would cause the most amusing set of rants from the anti-Mono crowd. Win/win.

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By better language, do you mean better than Java? The JVM supports many other great languages like Ruby, Clojure and Scala.

I'd love to see Google provide GWT support for Scala, but that's another issue :)

JVM still has type erasure though :(. I agree GWT for scala would be awesome

The JVM bytecode is shitty. It cannot support dynamic languages at the VM level (yet: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=292), the support for the C# equivalent of structs has been pushed back, and that makes any kind of hardware acceleration painful. Then theres type erasure - a total hack to get generics.

I think Oracle is being beyond stupid here. If anyone has the power to come up with a language and toolchain to make Java utterly irrelevant, its Google.

Bingo

History will repeat itself. Sun sued Microsoft over their implementation of Java. In response, MS drops Java and creates its own language (C#), framework (.NET), and VM (CLR) which now solidly competes with Java in the enterprise software space.

If MS was able to accomplish all of that, then imagine what Google could create if they decided to drop Java altogether ('Go' language might be the preview.) That would be a huge win for the software industry while a big (long term) loss for Oracle as Java further wans in popularity.

(Hmm....if Oracle can sue Google over the non-Java VM they created for Android couldn't they sue MS for their "JVM-like" CLR? This is another reason why their patent lawsuit is so ridiculous.)

No matter how you slice it, Google has the advantage in the long run while patent trolls like Oracle have the most to lose in the long term.

Dalvik isn't a JVM, and Clojure won't run on it without modification.

No... if anything they should buy out D... or use or create another high level-level low-level language like vala, ooc, etc(I don't like Google Go, though I have my own problems with vala and ooc), the reason D hasn't taken off is it's weird development process and license that miscarriages development on everything but the actual language.

Mono still has the sharecropper problem to it, that I thought Java got rid of...

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

http://twitter.com/timbray/status/21023407881

"Google Android: The worlds first Perl6 phone!"

Suspect parent was meant as a joke, but it does seem like this legal action might have interesting ramifications for Parrot. (Both positive and negative.)

I think it's more likely that the Go ARM compiler will be getting more love.

I think we'd be far more likely to see some sort of "Go-Mobile" released.

Great. That would land Google in the hands of Microsoft. Great move!

Switch from a VM they implemented themselves (Dalvik) that is not the JVM to somebody else's VM (Mono) that is also not the JVM? What would google gain from this?

This lawsuit is not about google's use of the JVM since they are not, in fact, using the JVM. It is about the fact that the Dalvik VM allegedly infringes on some Oracle-owned patents. It's possible that the Mono VM infringes on the same patents too, so switching VM may not make the slightest difference.

C# might be a better language than Java, but the JVM is hugely better than the Mono VM.

Anyway, Google isn't using the JVM in Android - they use Dalvik.

And then get a patent lawsuit from Microsoft as big as this one. Double Fail.

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