kallasoft

Sun recently held a 3-day workshop where technical leads and directors from IBM and Microsoft were invited to join together at the Sun campus to try and work on consolidating Virtual Machine efforts going forward; more specifically focused on developing solutions that would yield Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the JVM.

No signs of Microsoft giving up .NET and the CLR just yet, but the 3 companies atleast acknowledge that repeating the same virtualization work over and over again for different languages on different VMs doesn’t solve the correct problems.

The intent of this work is to get more languages ontop of the JVM (and possibly the .NET VM in the future) to provide better performance, runtime and deployment solutions for alternative languages as many conceeded that Java isn’t the hot-and-cool language that everyone is developing in anymore and attention needs to be paid to the strengths of some other very popular languages.

Will be interesting to see where this takes computer science and softare development moving forward if the work behind VMs become embedded directly into the OSs as we are seeing with Browser application platforms already beginning to embed and develop high-performance JavaScript VMs, and the Browser admitedly becoming a much more viable and actively developed-for application platform than anyone likely anticipated 10 years ago.

The idea of a JVM or .NET VM running applications may be replaced with the VMs being the OS/Machine platforms themselves in 10 years, with the applications being delivered via webapp.

With the work like that coming out of the JNode project, it’s not too far-fetched to thing a Java OS or .NET OS might be a revision or two behind Windows 7, Google OS 1, Max OS XI or whatever is next.