> Part of my curiosity is perhaps idle thinking of whether one VM could > be created which is capable of running multiple different platforms. > This goes beyond just the JVM and CLR but there is also the Flash VM > and LLVM with other VMs (does Erlang run on a VM? I know there is the > Squeak VM for Small Talk too). Having a single VM to replace the many > other VMs might allow for more hardware acceleration.
We'd need a bridge sitting between the arbitrary VM and runtime, which starts to sound like too many layers of abstraction. In some ways, this is what Scala and Fantom does but project specific with no sharing. > Still I am doubtful that this kind of cooperation would work even if > the problems were not technical. I imagine Microsoft would want > absolute control over their VM and the ability to add proprietary > extensions as they please. Yeah, it would have to be standardized in the same manner as HTML5. At first sight the CLR is AFAIK the only one that's standardized under a recognized standards organization (Ecma and ISO) and should thus be the most stable. > The conversation has moved on but I did also notice a degree to which > many .Net features seemed to exist for the benefit of COM > interoperability. I wonder what the platform would have looked like if > COM interoperability was not needed. I think that was overstated. COM is a natural part of the legacy Microsoft ecosystem, and the CLR (unlike the JVM) does not insist on the whole world fitting neatly inside a managed runtime. It's trivial to call other static or dynamic libraries, so I would say that while the Java is about platform independence, C# is about platform interoperability. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
