*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(tm) Pro*ah, now "extensions" i hadn't thought about. all i had in mind was "change" or "non-compliance".
Mr Joel Realubit on 17 Feb 2004:
why WOULDN'T they? i mean, if the standards are out in the open (i.e.,
specs are submitted to a public standards body), all previous smacking
MS got from Sun would not be relevant anymore, and nothing would stop
MS from implementing their own Java and still call it "Java" or some
such variation... and THEN append ".NET" to it. given that MS is MS, i
dont think they are above that. probably the only thing that would
IIRC, and AFAIK: 1) Java was initially submitted to the ECMA-- and was later withdrawn due to the fact that MS was the chair for that particular standardization group, and Sun feared that MS was going to using its clout to 'pollute' the standard.
Besides, even if Java were to become a formal standard, what's to prevent MS from *not* following the standard, or to follow it but implement "extensions" to it?
uhm, maybe not so much a CPU as an abstraction layer on top of an OS? would a VM necessarily have to mess around with assembly language and registers or would it be sufficient for it to just use the OS' system calls?
hold MS back would be the fact that they've already invested so much
on C#/.NET. OTOH, they could "pretend" to just support Java openly
again, and then try steering it back to "well hey C# still does the
job better than java afterall" later on. the solution to this, i
think, would be for Sun to simultaneously open-source their JDK's and
JREs, so everyone can have a hand in Java development as a whole, no
matter what MS does. (and it would be interesting to see what IBM does
when this happens)
2) You probably mean the Sun Java VM implementation (including the HotSpot JIT compiler). Migs Paraz (over an IM conversation I had w/ him) pointed out that the VM is essentially a software version of a CPU.
this is probably my own bias, but i had a project once that needed JNI (don't look at me, i was just following orders!) on linux and solaris. it would have went a hell of a lot smoother if i could look "under the hood" of the VM. the errors that get spit out by the VM were NOT particularly useful in debugging...Releasing source on the VM is like Intel releasing their complete microcode. And besides, the Sun Java Community Process pretty much does what you mean-- allow the community a hand in the development in Java (hence, the new features in 1.5, mostly due to JCP).
Anyway, the language itself + bytecode specification is pretty much in
the open.
speaking of native... wouldn't open-sourcing the VM/JDK/JRE enable people to better implement a native compiler for java? right now, i think gcj still has some limitations.
but i guess for pure-java stuff, i'd have to agree that as it is right now, as you pointed out, the JCP seems sufficient to meet everyone's needs (although i've lost track of all the acronyms in J2EE a long time ago!).
Microsoft went ahead and sent the CLI and C# specs to ECMA. What's preventing them from adding more instructions to MSIL? What's preventing them from improving on .NET and Visual C# to take advantage of those instructions? Technically, they're still following the standard they sent to the ECMA.
Heck, the NT line is supposedly POSIX-compliant, another standard.
The standard is there to guide implementors, but really, standards allow
some latitude in implementation. Annex E of the ECMA standard for the
the Common Language Infrastructure gives a list of things an implementor
can touch. For example, Annex E of the CLI ECMA spec says that the
security policy is implementation-specific. What's stopping MS from
implementing a security policy in .NET that breaks, say, code that works
on the Mono implementation? Or changing stuff in the classlib? Or adding
classes pertaining to security? (I.e., Mono and other implementors would
have to play a game of catch-up)
---
JM Ibanez
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