On Jan 16, 2009, at 15:47, e wrote: > Is it much much easier to make byte code than assembly code? I > mean, I understand why running on a VM makes sense as far as > instantly inheriting all the massive amounts of things out here for > Java .... but would it be possible to shoot for something down the > road that, behind the scenes, uses jvm whenever you say, > "import" . . .and writes and compiles assembler whenever you are > doing purely algorithmic things?
There are (at least) two reasons not to go that way: 1) The JVM provides a lot of infrastructure for programming languages that otherwise each compiler/interpreter would have to reinvent. Memory handling with garbage collection, for example. And of course a lot of platform-specific OS interfacing. Reinventing them is not only a lot of work, but also creates compatibility barriers in multi- language programming. It is very difficult to combine languages A and B if each of them has its own memory management. 2) Compiling to a mix of native code and JVM bytecode brings up a lot of ugly platform dependencies, the kind that makes the Java native interface so unpleasant to use. There is a reason why virtual machines like the JVM and CLI (.Net/ Mono) are gaining popularity. They provide security (by supervising programs' acces to the machine resources), portability, infrastructure, and the possibility to mix languages easily. There is a performance price to pay for this, but apparently more and more people are willing to do so, and at the same time that price is going down. Konrad. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
