I think Java may not be dead but has certainly stagnated. Sun near the end seemed to get very good at justifying lots of things which they were not going to do.
Anyway, the core discussion is about the VM technology. One thing I am curious about but isn't really a comparison of the VMs but rather a question about VM technologies in general. I wondered about GPU access and whether from a purely theoretical level it might be possible for any Virtual Machine to have more direct access to the GPU. My thinking around that is the complaints about the overhead of making calls into native libraries. As it is either of the two VMs, to access 3D Graphics will call into a graphics library i.e. OpenGL or DirectX. For the CLR DirectX can be accessed because it is based on COM and the .Net COM Bridge can be used. For JOGL, a bunch of wrappers are created for the native calls. Maybe this is just abstract thinking which would not work in practice but I wondered if it is possible to have some kind of fast path from the VM to the GPU such that the OpenGL etc API could be implemented from inside the VM meaning no external call needs to be made. I suppose that this might extend to a wider thinking about how VMs can interact with Hardware though I suspect that this is done via O/S level APIs and bypassing that cannot or should not be done. In principle a VM composes much of the features of a core operating system. In a sense certain embedded devices can allow Java to be the only platform. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
