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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

I believe some work went on to produce a Java-running chip at one point. It proved better to compile down to whatever suited the chip best.

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There have been several JVM (without the "V") created[1]. None of them really caught on other than the ARM Jazelle[2], which isn't really a JM, it is more of a JVM accelerator: it has support for direct execution of many of the JVM opcodes.

After investing lots of time and money into creating a JM, the companies were chagrined to find a general purpose processor with a good JVM (especially with JIT) could run circles around a direct-execution processor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

And that makes an excellent case for why JavaScript should simply be the bytecode of the future. x86 is gaudy and unsuited for many tasks--but it's where most of the speed innovation happens, thus it's the best platform for compiling other languages too.

I'll propose an alternative, fix JavaScript by adding APIs like ByteArrays and shorts and a proper int to the language. Over time, JS could become an excellent IL. We can standardize on intermediate bytecode, but like all things in web adoption, it will probably be the path of least resistance that works. (Who would ever give HTML graphic, multimedia, and threading abilities?)

I find it mildly amusing that the Android phone I use, an HTC Magic, has hardware acceleration for Java built in. Talk about a white elephant.

I think you're thinking of Azul (http://www.azulsystems.com/products/vega/arch).

They've been slowly withering away for the past couple of years (at least judging by the number of cars in their parking lot - I work in the building they are in). They just announced a cloud-based product based on their systems, so maybe there's still some life there.

Azul's Vega isn't really a Java processor; it's a generic RISC with a hardware-assisted read barrier.

In that sense, Intel is just making CPUs on top of x86 bytecode that runs natively. I wonder if a little extra firmware can eliminate the need for an OS altogether.

If by "a little extra firmware", you mean "calling the OS firmware, and burning it into the CPU", then yes.

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