JVM Language developpers: Your house is burning

Dear JRuby, Jython, Rhino or Groovy developers, you should drop your own runtime codebase now and use the JSR 292 API instead. It's just an advice from a friend(*) that hacks its own JVM langage during its spare time, but you should really consider to build a new version of your favourite language on top of JSR 292 API. * I am also one of the expert of the JSR 292 expert group. Why JSR 292 API is important ? Because it provides two killer features. Method handles, that are safe function pointers with currying and bunch of calling argument transformations. For a runtime this means that a function can be a method handle to the interpreter and later if the function is called often the method handle can be replaced by another one that will reference a dynamically generated bytecode blob. Currying is also important because it permits to insert live objects directly into a bytecode blob. The second feature is invokedynamic which let the language developer to specify the linking between an operation like +, * or a method call and the method handle that will be called. Moreover, the developer can install guards on runtime type and relink any call site if necessary. This allow to provide an approach that will scale with the complexity of the code. If the code is only call with integers, no need to test if the runtime has to call the + between to double. If later the code is used with double, call sites ca...

Date: May, 24 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/forax/archive/2010/05/24/jvm-language-developpers-your-house-burning

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