Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Although Python is pretty close, if you exclude Windows (and don't we all want to do that?).

I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java.

But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.

This takes nothing away from Java and the Java ecosystem though. The JVM allows around the same number of target systems to run not one language but dozens. There’s JRuby, Jython, Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, jgo, multiple COBOL compilers that target JVM, Armed Bear Common Lisp, Eta, Sulong, Oxygene (Object Pascal IIRC), Rakudo (the main compiler for Perl’s sister language Raku) can target JVM, JPHP, Renjin (R), multiple implementations of Scheme, Yeti, Open Source Simula, Redline (Smalltalk), Ballerina, Fantom, Haxe (which targets multiple VM backends), Ceylon, and more.

Perl has a way to inline other languages, but is only really targeted by Perl and by a really ancient version of PHP. The JVM is a bona fide target for so many. Even LLVM intermediate code has a tool to target the JVM, so basically any language with an LLVM frontend. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a PCode to JVM tool somewhere.

JavaScript has a few languages targeting it. WebAssembly has a bunch and growing, including C, Rust, and Go. That’s probably the closest thing to the JVM.

Prior to that I would frequently have issues (and still have issues with one-off random scripts that use system python).

No, you really can't. Not anything significant anyway. There are too many deviations between some of those systems to all you to run the same code.

There are differences, but they’re usually esoteric ( https://perldoc.perl.org/perlport#PLATFORMS ).

There's also Groovy.

I wonder what other languages run on the JVM. What about Perl, Icon, SNOBOL, Prolog, Forth, Rexx, Nim, MUMPS, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, Rust, BASIC, Rebol, Haxe, Red, etc.?

Partly facetious question, because I think there are some limitations in some cases that prevent it (not sure, but a language being too closely tied to Unix or hardware could be why), but also serious. Since the JVM platform has all that power and performance, some of these languages could benefit from that, I'm guessing.

#lazyweb

  > I can run basically any Perl code back to Perl 4 (March 1991) on Perl 5.40.2 which is current.

I'm only half joking. Perl has so many ways to do things, many of them obscure but preferable for specific cases. It's often a write-only language if you can't get ahold of the dev who wrote whatever script you're trying to debug.

I wonder if modern LLMs could actually help with that.

From experience, they can.

Java was marketed (at least in its early days) as a WORA language - WRITE ONCE RUN ANYWHERE.

Perl was unmarketed as a WORM language - WRITE ONCE READ MANY (TIMES). ;)

jk, i actually like perl somewhat.

but I think Larry and team went somewhat overboard with that human-style linguistics stuff that they applied to perl.

e.g. poetry, venv and pyenv have been mentioned in just the next few comments below yours. and this is just one example. i have seen other such seeming confusion and different statements by different people about what package management approach to use for python.

I no longer shy away from writing <500 LOC utility/glue scripts in python thanks to uv.

https://github.com/Frege/frege

https://github.com/typelead/eta

Of the others you mentioned, I bet there's a couple JVM Prologs out there, but haven't encountered any myself.

Your conclusion is correct but not because Python 3 came out in 2008. It was ready to switch to some point a few years later but we'll before 2025 (I don't recall when sorry I didn't do Python at the time!)

Can you read arbitrary code written by developers from around the world in PL/1, or Ada, Forth, APL, or even C++? Big languages have lots of syntax choices, yes. It doesn’t need to be abused.

Even C has an obfuscated code contest that’s been going on for decades.

There is an OCaml-Java. NetRexx targets the JVM. For Prolog there are JIProlog and TuProlog at least.

Red basically is REBOL. Yes, Red targets IA-32, ARM, JVM, AVM2, x64, and the CLR.

I’ve seen some experiments for running Perl on the JVM. Rakudo can target the JVM for Raku, which is Perl’s sister language.

For Ada, gnat can target the JVM. https://docs.adacore.com/gnatvm-docs/jgnat_ug.html

For Forth there are a number of implementations. JVMForth, jForth, Misty Beach Forth, HolinJ Forth, bjforth, and xforth at least.

I’ve seen a couple different Java libraries for SNOBOL-style matching but I’ve never seen a SNOBOL tool that targets the JVM.

MUMPS has M4J.

Rust is interesting. There are JVMs written in Rust. There’s support for the JNI for Rust for interoperability. I’m not aware of a JVM target for Rust, though. However, Rust still uses LLVM as its primary code generator. As I mentioned, there are LLVM IC to JVM compilers.

Basic isn’t really a single language. For something like MS Visual Basic, there’s Jabasco. There’s JVMBasic. MBC transpiles Basic to C or C++, so you could use clang to put its output on the JVM. PuffinBASIC is a Basic interpreter written in Java. GLBasic compiles to C++, so again with LLVM all things are possible here. BCX Basic also outputs C or C++. There’s something just called “BASIC Compiler” that is both written in Java and compiles its source to JVM bytecode. The basgo compiler outputs Go code, so anywhere you can target golang code you can target Basic code with basgo, including the JVM. I’m sure there are a lot more. These are different versions of Basic on the source side, some of them similar to one another.

Nimlvm is a Nim compiler to LLVM intermediate code. So once again, as a chain of steps it can be done.

Speaking of chaining translators/transpilers/compilers, did I mention there’s a WebAssembly to JVM compiler? There are actually more than one. Chicory is one and asmble is another. There’s something called “Happy New Moon with Report”. There’s also a WASM written in Scala called Swam. I’m sure I’m missing some.

So the huge and growing list of languages that target WASM can also be chain-translated to target the JVM. That includes C, Rust, Nim, TypeScript, C++, Forth, Go, F#, Lua, Zig, and more. https://wasmlang.org/

So if it targets the JVM, it can run on the JVM. But also if it targets WebAssembly, C, C++, LLVM IC, Lua, Go, and more it can also through other tools target the JVM. Or if it has an interpreter that runs on the JVM because it’s written in Java, Scala, Clojure, or some other language you can get it there. If you really want to get exotic and esoteric, there’s an x86 emulator in WASM out there and you could probably run that on one of the JVM WASM interpreters.

I briefly looked at Frege; both it and the person it is named after are very interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076220

Full speed ahead, and damn the naysayers, er, downvoters, er, torpedos! ;)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut