In-response-to-base:
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 1995 01:18:30 GMT
From: Guido van Rossum (guido@cnri.reston.va.us)
Portable Byte Code Won't Fly
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 21 May 2012 09:17:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Fedora)
Last-Modified: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 19:45:03 GMT
ETag: "2ac31b-353-59212dc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 851
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
On July 5th there was a workshop, organized by the W3
consortium (esp. Tim BL and Dan Connolly) where
representatives of many scripting languages were present
(I remember seeing Java, Python, Tcl, REXX, and ScriptX).
The concept of a common VM / byte code was discussed
extensively and the conclusion was that basically the
power of these languages is not in their byte code
but in their library. For example, Python's byte code
does not define concepts like "integer" or "string" --
rather, these are library types (as far as the VM
is concerned). ScriptX has a very simple VM but an
extremely powerful library.
What this means is that the idea of having a common
VM or byte code and compiling each language to it won't
fly unless a common library is also defined, and given
the size of the respective libraries this is unlikely
to happen.