Hacker News Reader

"Javascript with JIT" seems to be the most popular new VM. I loathe to admit it, but I at the moment it appears that's where most GUI scripting will go eventually.

Apart from that, there is of course PyPy, which is "Python with JIT", and probably many more. Look carefully, there is no lack of VMs in OSS.

View on HN

> Look carefully, there is no lack of VMs in OSS.

There is just a lack of good ones, though.

Define "good one"?

Personally, I don't like the heavy Java and C# VMs at all.

Browser javascript VMs seem to be much more lightweight, which is good for interactive clients, and lately with NodeJS they gain a lot of momentum server-side too.

What makes VMs like Luajit, Pypy, V8 and Tracemonkey/Jaegermonkey either not "good" or not "OSS"?

I wouldn't call them not "good", but they're not the same kind of universal platform that the JVM is. They all pretty much serve one language.

That's true. Most try to focus on one language, instead of including everything.

LLVM might be closest to an universal open source JIT platform. It is used as the backend of many of the language-specific VMs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com