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New Intermediate Language Proposed

Posted by michael on from the real-men-write-in-assembly dept.

WillOutPower writes "Sun is inviting Cray (of supercomputer fame) and IBM (needs no introduction...) to join and create a new intermediate run-time language for high-performance computing. Java's bytecode, Java Grande, and Microsoft's IL language for the Common Language Runtime, it seems a natural progression. I wonder if the format will be in XML? Does this mean ubiquitous grid computing? Maybe now I won't have to write my neural network in C for performance :-)"

2 of 440 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's the point? by basking2 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is a good question to ask.

    So, one of the ideas behind C# was to make an intermediate laguage (MS-Java-byte-code, if you will) which could be quickly compiled for the CPU in question. Stick a system call envrionment and garbage collector around it and you have [roughly] what C# is. One of the nice things about Java was that it was for no specific machine... it was very very simple at the instruction level, but making native code from that can be a pain.

    Now, from the looks of the posted article some folks now want an intermediate laguage that can represent concepts like instruction vectorization and maybe SMP (hypter threading) and perhaps some other more complicated constructs that Java's machine code just doesn't talk about.

    The end result is that you would have very fast machine code for the number-crunching loops in the code and portability. The compile time would be fairly quick and the optimization for the local CPU would be "smart" and fast if you marked up what where vectorizable instructions.

    Why C# falls short, I can't say. I've only looked at the Java machine, never at how C# represets a program.

    Hope this is helpful!

    --
    Sam
  2. too little, too late by penguin7of9 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The effort is part of a government-sponsored program under which the three companies are competing to design a petascale-class computer by 2010.

    We already have such a runtime: it's called "CLR". The CLR is roughly like the JVM but with features required for high performance computing added (foremost, value classes).

    Sun wants the so-called Portable Intermediate Language and Run-Time Environment to become an open industry standard.

    I hope people won't fall for that again. Sun promised that Java would be an "open industry standard", but they withdrew from two open standards institutions and then turned Java over to a privately run consortium, with specifications only available under restrictive licenses.

    Sun's goal is to apply its expertise in Java to defining an architecture-independent, low-level software standard - like Java bytecodes - that a language could present to any computer's run-time environment.

    Sun's "expertise" in this area is not a recommendation: the JVM has a number of serious design problems (e.g., conformant array types, arithmetic requirements, lack of multidimensional arrays) that attest to Sun's lack of expertise and competence in this area.

    What this amounts to is Sun conceding that Java simply isn't suitable as a high-performance numerical platform and that it will never get fixed (another broken promise from Sun). But because the CLR actually has many of the features needed for a high-performance numerical platform, Sun is worried about their marketshare.

    The question for potential users is: why wait until 2010 when the CLR is already here? And why trust Sun after they have disappointed the community so thoroughly, both in terms of broken promises on an open Java standard and in terms of technology?

    Maybe we will be using a portable high-performance runtime other than the CLR by 2010, but I sure hope Sun will have nothing to do with it. (In fact, I think there is a good chance Sun won't even be around then anymore.)