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Runtimes and Open Source?

Posted by Cliff on from the stuff-to-think-about dept.

Caoch93 asks: "I recently read the Mono project's rationale and have found it compelling in the way it shows the Mono project as being the result of engineering concerns rather than concerns of siding with Microsoft. One thing that it has strongly bolstered in me is my belief that runtimes which interpret intermediary languages are going to play an increasingly important role in programming in the years to come, and it makes me wonder- should the open source community consider developing its own runtime (ala JVM or CLI) which would thus be totally open to the public? Currently, it seems like the options for a runtime are the JVM, which is still dominated by Sun with respect to its design future, and CLI, which is an ECMA standard but is critical to the Microsoft .NET platform. It would seem to me that having an open source runtime (and languages that compile to it) could be critical to moving with the times, and the freedom from proprietary influences would seem to be important to keeping such a system truly in the interest of its programmers. I don't know...is CLI already achieving this? I an ECMA standard enough, or is an ECMA standard really just codification of proprietary interests. If so, should the open source community consider its own itermediary language runtime...and what would be proper goals for such a project?"

3 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Parrot by phnx90 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Parrot the VM for Perl6 is being developed w/ multiple languages in mind.

    1. Re:Parrot by Graelin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

      Parrot seems to achieve this goal to a degree. I don't know if the Parrot folk see it as an OS universal runtime and that may hinder it (in this capacity).

      As you say, they're planning for multi-language support. I think they're trying to make it Python ready, that right there is two of the major OS languages.

      I don't think Parrot will be adopted too quickly though. Look at Apache, 2.0 adoption has been slow due to lack of 3rd party modules. Now think about CPAN - same thing.

  2. Re:Java? by Gerry+Gleason · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One of the big problems cited in the past was that Sun would not certify OS JVMs, without a big fee. In most cases, this is impractical for OS projects that need to spend limited resources on development and infrastructure. I know some have suggested a certification "scholarship" idea, but I don't know if that has gone anywhere. I'm more willing to trust Sun and their long history of promoting open systems, if not open source, but others remain very skeptical.