Ronald Antony contacted me concerning a project that he is working on. He's looking for comments, and I thought that you all might have some interest in this.
Hi, I figured you might be interested in and able to contribute in some way to an initiative I started. Right now, we're in the pure discussion phase of things, but to give you a quick abstract: Basically I have talked with many people from the GNUStep, SmallTalk, MacOSX/Darwin and TOM (www.gerbil.org/tom/) communities about the Java thing. While each of them has their own preferences in terms of languages, platforms, etc. it became increasingly clear to me that\ a) Java is here to stay b) Java shares obviously a lot with ObjectiveC, SmallTalk and TOM c) choice of implementation languages is a good thing. While it's trivial to write a program that uses Pascal, C and Fortran code, it is currently an inefficient nightmare, or impossible, to combine programs written in Java, ObjC, SmallTalk and TOM, despite the similarities of these languages. On the JVM side of things, there are solutions, ranging from extended VMs, which have low acceptance, to implementations of SmallTalk to JVM compilers, which do intelligent optimizations to get rid of some of the gross inefficiences incurred when trying to implement the full functionality of a language like SmallTalk on top of the limited JVM architecture, which doesn't support some of the features SmallTalk supports. On the native code side however, a lot less restrictions exist, and it seems the time has come for a cross-language portable object runtime, or as I called it Open Runtime Environment for Objects (OREO) (given that Cookies and Java go well together...) In other words, if we create a modern runtime that supports a set of functionality that modern OOLs like TOM have, then any other language could be compiled into OREO objects, even if in the context of that language, they will utilize but a subset of OREO. This would allow the seamless integration of native compiled Java, ObjC, SmallTalk, and TOM. I have set up a proto-mailing list, an alias [EMAIL PROTECTED] which currently has members from the GNUStep (gcc/ObjC/GNU runtime), MacOSX/Cocoa (gcc/ObjC/Apple-NeXT runtime) and TOM (TOM/Tom runtime) communities. It would be great to get some people from the Java side of things, too. Eventually, we'd like to include SmallTalkers, too, but since SmallTalk is more or less a simple subset of TOM's functionality, there don't seem to be many fundamental hurdles to integrate SmallTalk with an OREO runtime, if/when it comes to exist. Java however has its own set of unique issues, some of which are not fully understood by the people who are so far on the list. Any help, show of support or comments on the feasibility and desirability of such a project are highly welcome, either in private, or to the list. Regards, Ronald ============================================================================== "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." G.B. Shaw | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | NeXT-mail welcome ============================================================================== "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." G.B. Shaw | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | NeXT-mail welcome
