Article: The JVM's Popularity

JVM and Modula3

I had kept an article from Dr. Dobbs Report called The JVM's Popularity by Eric J. Bruno with the intent of writing a quick blog post on it. This is the time I have to do it.

The article covers the Java VM versatility in a quick two page article. It describes some of the recent additions to the Java Language to support dynamic languages like JRuby called invokedynamic (JSR-292). This additional functionality allows dynamically typed languages to run without a performance penalty. The article explains this in a little more detail.

The article characterizes three categories of JVM languages: improve Java, port an existing language, and miscellaneous. Nothing too controversial. I did find one comment which I could not confirm though:

...NetRexx (the original JVM scripting language);

This was a surprising remark. I had never really heard of NetRexx running on the JVM until about a year ago when I was looking at a listing of JVM languages, and saw it. Does anyone know, and can confirm that it was the original JVM scripting language?

The last part of article refers to the upcoming release of Java 8 including the replacement Nashorn JS engine for Rhino.

A good quick article for an executive rundown on VM languages.