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by wintom 3454 days ago
The papers are great, a lot of research has been done in this area despite the closed nature of .net prior to the recent open sourcing. Too tough to summarize in one comment but I want to add a few things for anyone thinking of checking them out.

I firmly believe .NET poses a fantastic programming environment for anyone to build systems, applications, the back bone of companies on top of. I think its significantly better than Java and has received much better support form Microsoft than the Java eco system and the JVM has from Oracle.

Functional languages like F# are allowing startups to build systems quickly that can scale from 0 to millions of users and I think this whole eco system, now that its open, is due for a renaissance.
1 comments
chrisseaton 3454 days ago
> I think its significantly better than Java and has received much better support form Microsoft than the Java eco system and the JVM has from Oracle.

Several of these papers that you are giving as evidence for Microsoft's better investment are actually about research done into the JVM, by Oracle.

I would guess, but can't really prove, that Oracle invests more money into VM research than anyone else in the world.

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wavefunction 3454 days ago
You may be right about Oracle, but I certainly can't tell from the VM offerings they put out.
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chrisseaton 3454 days ago
Do you really think the engineering in the JVM is that bad? I can't think of many VMs that have the technical capabilities that HotSpot or Graal do. The CLR doesn't even do basic speculative optimisations. Maybe Azul Zing or J9 are comparable in terms of the advanced techniques they use, but would you really put the Oracle JVM that far behind? I'm not sure there's any sound technical basis for that.
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wavefunction 3454 days ago
I don't believe the strengths of the JVM are due to Oracle's efforts.
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pjmlp 3454 days ago
Who do think pays the salaries of those engineers?
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KirinDave 3454 days ago
It's more that a lot of the work people admire was done before or close to the acquisition date and therefore probably should be credited to Sun.

That said, I'm not sure why things like speculative execution in the JVM context get such play as dark magic when it seems like the JVM and CLR are pretty neck-and-neck in terms of deliverable performance when we get down to the level where we're not affected by larger architectural differences.

There are a lot of different ways to get high performance code from a VM environment. But to hear many people tell it the JVM is the only competent one. I'm just not sure the evidence bears that out.

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