At 10:27 AM 2/9/01 -0500, Terry Westley wrote:

>Instead of creating a new AVM, is technically and politically feasible
>to extend the JVM "standard" to add the capabilities we'd like to see
>in an AVM?  Then, if I target code to this JVM/AVM, I need only have
>users fetch the latest version of the JVM.

Technically it is feasible, of course.  But I believe Sun is still the
owner of the standard.  Politically I consider it highly unlikely they
would consider putting anything in there to support Ada.

>I'm worried that a separate AVM would go nowhere if it's just targeted at
>the Ada niche market.

If an AVM does everything JVM does, but does it better and provides new
capability, you might be surprised how well it would catch on, especially
if we make it freely available.  As long as all the stuff that currently
runs from Java continues to run,  most people wouldn't notice the change,
but those of use who would take advantage of the new features would have
the advantage of having additional power available to us.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to write generic aplets?  There are
many cases where the generic model fits better than the class model.

And don't worry that AVM may not be able to do JVM work better.  There are
now many examples of software written in Ada that performs better than the
same software written in C.  Ada language features, such as slices for
arrays, really do make it possible to improve performance over featureless
C-class languages.  (Improve performance in the generated code, that is.)

sro

S. Ron Oliver, semi-retired professor of Computer Science and Computer
Engineering.  www.csc.calpoly.edu/~sroliver

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