Assuming everyone has done there jobs correctly then:
- Well written machine specific machine code will be fastest. Good compilers often come close to this.
Well, for various values of 'well written'. I'd be picking a compiler has far more ability to optimise than I do, given honking great L1 & L2 caches, pre-fetch queues and them frickin 20 instruction pipelines. In fact I'd even guess that it would only be possible to optimise one path through an application : a compiler would thrash you as soon as the cpu started predicting which of the branches you'd take.
- Interpreters have a constant overhead and, for most work, are a lot slower.
For the right task ie when you'd use one, an interpreter would be an order of magnitude faster. On a 1 Gig box, if you save 1,000,000 instructions, you've saved yourself a second. If your interpreter cuts down on the time taken by an hour it saved 3600 seconds.
Which by no means implies that Perl is fun or even pleasant, but still...
- virtual machines are essentialy well optimised interpreters.
A vm is a compile target, it doesn't matter when compilation occurs.
M$ methodology ;-) (note: this is my speculation)
M$ operates at a level no different from any other (product-based) business, identifying markets they can make a profit in and targetting them. None of what you speculate relates specifically to their anti-competitive or monopolistic behaviour. They are also probably one of the *least* buzzword abusing company in software (unless you'd consider Spreadsheet, Word Processor and E-mail to be buzzwords). Their problem is in using new words in a context which they have no commonly understood definition.
Cheers, Kurt.
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