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Generic VMs Key To Future of Coding

Posted by Soulskill on from the acme-brand dept.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister calls for generic VMs divorced from the syntactic details of specific languages in order to provide developers with some much-needed flexibility in the years ahead: 'Imagine being able to program in the language of your choice and then choose from any of several different underlying engines to execute your code, depending upon the needs of your application.' This 'next major stage in the evolution of programming' is already under way, he writes, citing Jim Hugunin's work with Python on the CLR, Microsoft's forthcoming Dynamic Language Runtime, Jython, Sun's Da Vinci Machine, and the long-delayed Perl/Python Parrot. And with modern JITs capable of outputting machine code almost as efficient as hand-coded C, the idea of running code through a truly generic VM may be yet another key factor that will shape the future of scripting."

2 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. The future of Python is PyPy by YA_Python_dev · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Within the Python community, interest in Parrot seems completely dead.

    Generic VMs are so 2005, the future of Python runtime is PyPy. From a single implementation of Python (written in Python), they can compile Python code to C, JVM, automatically create a customizable JITed VM, etc...

    Check them out: they are doing some seriously cool stuff and they can use a bit of help.

    --
    There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
  2. Colas: Coke, Pepsi and Jolt point a way forward by itsybitsy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ian Piumarta and the VPRI [http://vpri.org] are doing some amazing work related to this story.

    COLAs: Combined Object Lambda Architectures - A Complete System in 20,000 Lines of Code.
    http://piumarta.com/software/cola
    The system is slowly evolving towards version 1.0 which
            * is completely self-describing (from the metal, or even FPGA gates, up) exposing all aspects of its implementation for inspection and incremental modification;
            * treats state and behaviour as orthogonal but mutually-completing descriptions of computation;
            * treats static and dynamic compilation as two extremes of a continuum;
            * treats static and dynamic typing as two extremes of a continuum; and
            * late-binds absolutely everything: programming (parsing through codegen to runtime and ABI), applications (libraries, communications facilities), interaction (graphics frameworks, rendering algorithms), and so on.

    http://piumarta.com/papers/colas-whitepaper.pdf
    http://piumarta.com/papers/EE380-2007-slides.pdf
    http://piumarta.com/pepsi/objmodel.pdf
    http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf

    Allen Wirfs-Brock and Dan Ingalls are currently working on bringing notions like Colas to the browser so that we can use any programming language WE choose to for our browser based applications. Check out their interview here.
    http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Dan-Ingalls-and-Allen-Wirfs-Brock-On-Smalltalk-Lively-Kernel-Javascript-and-Programming-the-Inter/