the corner office

Hmm. Still snowed under with assignments (but nearly done), I take a breather and see that Apache is proposing creating a new Open Source JVM (well, runtime platform fffiffle).

The BileBlog captures the more cynical viewpoint:

It's breathtaking, it truly is. These people want to build a JVM and they have NOTHING. All they have is a crayon drawing, boundless faith, naive belief, and the cheerfulness of a village idiot.

Miguel de Icaza has a slightly more diplomatic analysis. It seems that the main motivation is to write something that's a little less, well, GPL-ish.

What does it really mean? Well, the Blackdown JDK got installed on my Gentoo box when I asked the portage gods for 'java', and the reason for that is because it's free software. And kudos to the Blackdown crowd for their efforts when Sun wasn't interested in Linux. But a 5 minute gander in the forums and I was off to Sun's website to download their JVM. Common wisdom says that if you're in any way interested in performance, Sun's implementation (or IBM's for that matter), run rings around the open-source implementation(s).

The reality is that a JVM is a hard thing to build, and once you've got one, optimising it to the point where it can be taken seriously as a viable development platform is an even longer slog. Java nearly died because the early JVMs were so painfully slow. Java still has that reputation despite the fact that Sun's sunk gazillions into making bytecode kinda-sorta as fast as natively compiled code in many situations. I'm sure there are people who think it's essential to have a free software JVM implementation, and maybe they have a point; and perhaps if nothing else they'll keep the Suns and IBMs of the world more honest, but still, this seems like an incredible waste and duplication of effort.

(Update: I gather Blackdown is a little closer to Sun than it used to be, and not entirely 'free' either... but the point remains - the Sun JVM seems to be the only serious choice for serious Java use right now)