JVM Language Summit

[Charles]

I'm attending the JVM Language Summit this week at the Santa Clara campus of Sun Microsystems. The agenda looks quite interesting and there will be a presentation on the Parrot VM.

I'm also still interested in any volunteers that would like to help with getting Cobra/JVM going.

-Chuck

[relez]

Any interesting/useful feed, Chuck?

[Charles]

Overall, it was a very interesting conference. I'm planning on blogging about it in more detail at some point, so I'll just get to the main points that apply to Cobra:

-- I didn't present Cobra due in part to having a cold and sore throat. But also, many of the attendees were already language authors or zealous proponents of an existing language, so it wasn't really the right place to look for converts.

-- I didn't manage to generate any interest with Sun in sponsoring a port of Cobra to JVM. Perhaps I should have tried harder, but my impression is that such money issues are always driven by the market. I predict that around the time that Microsoft and Sun eventually take an interest in Cobra will be around the time that we already have the things we need.

-- I'm still set on porting Cobra to JVM. I've been refactoring the compiler for this purpose and will also be generalizing some aspects of the language to be cross platform. How long this will take, I have no idea. My time is currently split between contracting (aka "paying the bills"), forums/support, immediate Cobra issues and the refactoring.

[gogobyte]

Chuck,
What do you think about the approach to portability of Fan language (http://www.fandev.org/)? Is it good?

[Charles]

I talked to Brian, the author of Fan, quite a bit while I was there. Fan specializes in being 100% portable between JVM and .NET. To accomplish this, it has its own library entirely. Brian expressed to me that currently Fan cannot leverage a native library without being manually wrapped to be a Fan library. I don't know whether you can vend a Fan library back out to a C# or Java developer. If you can, I doubt if the library would "feel natural" since it would use the Fan classes. For example, Boo has this problem: A method in your library might return a BooList instead of a System.Collections.Generic.List<of>, which won't feel normal to a VB or C# user. Cobra does not have this problem.

Fan's approach to typing is somewhat odd. It allows automatic downcasting which happens at run-time. Cobra's approach is to require the cast or an if-statement that proves the type is compatible:

if machine inherits Car
    carMechanic.fixCar(machine)

I guess I'm wandering off topic...

Getting back to libraries, I want people using Cobra to have the choice to use the same libraries they did as a C# or Java developer. They may want this for familiarity or they may want it so they can vend their libraries out to users of the same platform.

Later we can add 100% cross platform libraries and people can choose if they want to use those or "speak in their native tongue". I suppose I'll get some practice making such libraries when I get the compiler to be self hosted on JVM.