Well to be sincere , languages on JVM have been a dream that did not gain the popularity that some expected. Sure some of these languages got popular, but they never become that popular. Latest popular example being Clojure.
I think there are 2 reasons why porting a language to a very popular VM is not a very popular idea a) Porting code sucks, a tedious process b) People want to be in control I have seen that with python, cpython is the most popular and oldest implementation. Compared to cpython , jython that runs on the JVM and ironpython that runs on .NET/Mono are hardly used. Even pypy that is mainly pure python that introduces the JIT VM to python , has been met with a lot of resistance. By the way pypy is not just python with a JIT VM its a whole platform very much like JVM that allows the implementation of languages. PyPy for example has a smalltalk language. But the JIT VM is very complex subject that cpython developers do not want to touch even with a ten meters pole. Its a lot of hard work to convince developers to port to your side when they are happy with millions of lines of code they have already wrote for their own platform. Even when you are all mighty Java. I can talk about python and would say its a lot of work. Over 50% of cpython is in C and most of python libraries are same too. So unless you are willing to port those libraries directly to your smalltalk VM there will be very little interest in your VM. This has been a big problem for PyPy. I think Ruby is in a similar situation. Probably most languages are like this. This also has been a big problem for jython , which is python on JVM. You could assume that python coders would be all excited to run python on JVM and use Java libraries out of the box. Actually no. Python developers are too much in love with cpython libraries and do not blame them. Cpython has created a culture of "there should be one way of doing it" and it has drawn a crowd commited to that mentality, Java aint it. So its more like Java developer that also happen to like python that are drawn to jython that python developers. Another reason is that is not that hard to make software using two different languages and make those two sides communicate. Its not a bad idea though, there will be a crowd that would be interested in running python code inside pharo for example. Afterall some people do use jython and PyPy. So its far from useless. But I would not get my hope high that developers would die for this feature. On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 1:27 PM, askoh <[email protected]> wrote: > There is a trend of making languages to run on Java Virtual Machine. But it > still cannot run Smalltalk like Smalltalk on Smalltalk VM. Is it a possible > goal? > > How about running Java on the StVM so that Java can have the live > environment and debugging capabilities like in full blown Smalltalk? How > about doing the same for Python, Ruby, Lisp, ObjC, C#, etc? > > Thanks in advanced for all you thoughts. > > Aik-Siong Koh > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://forum.world.st/Smalltalk-Virtual-Machine-StVM-tp4758961.html > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at > Nabble.com. > >
