Ted Neward reporting from the Lang.NET Symposium:

I’m left with the impression that the JVM really needs something akin to the DLR, because I’m not convinced that just modifying the JVM itself (the recently-named Da Vinci Machine) will be the best road to take—if it’s implemented inside the VM, then modifications and enhancements will take orders of magnitude longer to work their way into production use, since there will be so much legacy (Java) code that will have to be regression-tested against those proposed changes. Doing it in a layer-on-top will make it easier and more agile, I believe.

Orders of magnitude longer—what is with those guys? If improving the VM core is going to scare big and slow corporations into waiting ten times (or one hundred times!?) longer than they already do to “approve” it, that’s their damage. Let them run their old apps on their old VMs (secretly pleased to have another excuse to push back) while others enjoy better performance for dynamic languages.

Good for Microsoft for building their brand new runtime mezzanine, but it still seems to run Python about four times slower than ol’ VisualWorks running Smalltalk. Can they ever catch it using a second-tier VM? Does 4x even matter? It will be interesting to see, with some competition from Sun.

Sometimes it’s the foundation and not the front porch that needs attention. For the JVM, it’s that time. The surprising thing is that Sun has the gumption to do it.