It'd be great if there was material on the limits of the JVM and the CLR. AFAICT these are the only virtual machines that are trying to be universal (run both static and dynamic languages well).

[[[Sent from a mobile device. Please forgive brevity and typos.]]]

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
axel at rauschma.de
Home: http://rauschma.de
Blog: http://2ality.com

> On 15.05.2014, at 03:02, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:
> 
> Axel Rauschmayer wrote:
>> What is the best “bytecode isn’t everything” article that exists? The “the web needs bytecode” meme comes up incredibly often, I’d like to have something good to point to, as an answer.
>> 
>> This one looks good: http://mozakai.blogspot.de/2013/05/the-elusive-universal-web-bytecode.html
> 
> That's a good one. It reflects lots of discussions Alon and others, including yours truly, have had over the years.
> 
> The important point is not just "bytecode isn't everything" -- also important are trade-offs in have two syntaxes, something that came up here on es-discuss long ago. Here's a post from Maciej of Apple:
> 
> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2009-December/010238.html
> 
> The topic then was AST encoding, not something people think of as "bytecode". Michael Franz at UCI and Ben Livshits at MSR had worked on arithmetic coding of ASTs (avoids need for verification).
> 
> The topic is deep and memes die hard. I think Alon's post is the right thought-piece; anyone have others?
> 
> /be
>

It'd be great if there was material on the limits of the JVM and the CLR. AFAICT these are the only virtual machines that are trying to be universal (run both static and dynamic languages well).