Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: BGB Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?B?QW5kcm9pZOKAlFdoeSBEYWx2aWs/?= Date: Sun, 29 May 2011 19:38:19 -0700 Organization: albasani.net Lines: 69 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news.albasani.net 55febGhjjJ8mlmFxYHFmIIqGXf4vUWFjpcFzplE8UAUBYLCuhFpYvylXWYS1MK6tILpgvhxd0ESuqUlee0HP+6YC+0gkCFn4jIrURzFAKdb1XwRlpTEKn2ZFjNWUGr+3 NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 02:41:17 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: news.albasani.net; logging-data="IbOBcFQEAVQNIMUZay6V2o2WPilSrLH4ohdyxC4C1OhA43SMxZfUURaz0RrFClZi38mvzXy5gDobr16XF+qNwulNlsq6D98qUGPLZ2ZbeE6kDGoCgaGT/O1EhUfjF/yB"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@albasani.net" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:U528BlvD9LONK4qiaGm7LgGi+LU= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4707 On 5/29/2011 5:44 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message, BGB wrote: > >> ... register-based VMs are not necessarily non-portable, just the >> performance argument is a bit weak, especially on x86 ... > > Which, interestingly, is not very popular for ultramobile devices. > possibly, but I primarily develop on x86 systems, which have a few relevant properties: indirect addressing is nearly free; memory in-cache performs nearly as fast as registers; in 32 bit mode, there are only 8 usable GPRs, of which 2 or 3 are generally needed by the CPU or ABI (ESP, EBP, and generally EBX on ELF based targets). now, maybe for RISC style targets things are faster, either with more GPRs or slower memory access being a more major factor, but alas, I haven't really used them much. >> although they still use the Java language, which could itself be a >> factor in a legal sense ... > > How come? Is the licence for the Sunacle JDK (which is what I use for > compiling programs) violated in any way? > apparently, Sun/Oracle is fairly fussy about who uses their trademark and when, and basically they went and sued Google, IIRC (?), for using their trademark in an unliscensed and partial implementation, and for infringing on their patents. although, normally one could just make a nearly identical clone language with a different name, an issue is that pretty much all the standard JDK packages use the word 'java' as part of their name, meaning that to completely escape the trademark issue, one would also have to rename the packages, breaking compatibility. this is also partly why the standards documents for JavaScript uses the name ECMAScript instead, and many alternative implementations and variants of the language (JScript, ActionScript, HaXe, ...) also have different names. my own BGBScript language itself is (loosely) a JavaScript variant. although it started out as a more loosely related language, was later brought much closer to JS, and more recently drifted a lot closer to ActionScript and added a few more non-JS features (the most drastic re-addition being optional C/Java/... style declarations, as opposed to using the 'var' and 'function' keywords...). side-note: my big effort to make a big/new/fancy Java-like language (with lots more features, like structs and properties, ...) ended in me mothballing it (due to having bigger concerns) and just shoving some of its planned features (and syntax/semantics) onto my existing script language and VM, creating a sort of hybrid... all this is in contrast to the more cohesive identity, say, of C, where there is a more solid core language, and generally lots of implementations and implementation-specific extensions. or languages like Scheme where although a common name and identity are used, general compatibility between implementations is nearly non-existent... or such...