EDSAC on your desk.

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Mon Sep 21 19:21:59 1998

On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Huw Davies wrote:

> Well, if you want to do something reasonably portable (I was about to write
> portable, but someone will provide a nice counter example :-) you could
> write it in a language that has a compiler written in itself that generates
> pseudo-code. Two examples come to mind, Pascal and BCPL (me, I prefer the
> latter, but what the heck).

Excellent idea! That's part of the reason to choose Java :-) Sun's Java
compiler is written in Java, and generates code for the Java virtual
machine. Most of the Java runtime environment is also written in Java,
except for the machine-level glue which is written in a combo of C and
assembler.

I'm sure future generation won't have to worry about performance of the
JVM, but for users that have that concern today, many Java compilers can
also compile down to native code (not to mention JIT).

I'm not a big Java fan for most applications, but for certain niches it's
a great idea.

-- Doug
Received on Mon Sep 21 1998 - 19:21:59 BST