JAX: Project Nashorn #

The last talk I went to was on project Nashorn - demonstrating the capability
to run dynamic languages on the JVM by writing a JavaScript implementation as a
proof of concept that is fully ECMA compliant and still performs better than
Mozilla’s project Rhino.

It was nice to see Lisp, created in 1962, referenced as being the first
language that featured a JIT compiler as well as garbage collection. It was
also good to see Smalltalk referenced as pioneering class libraries, visual GUI
driven IDEs and bytecode.

As such Java essentially stands on the shoulders of giants. Now dynamic
language writers can themselves use the JVM to boost their productivity by
profiting from the VM’s memory management, JIT optimisations, native threading.
The result could be a smaller code base and more time to concentrate on
interesting language features (of course another result would be that the JVM
becomes interesting not only for Java developers but also to people who want to
use dynamic languages instead).

The projects invoke dynamic as well as the DaVinci machine are both interesting
areas for people to follow who are interested in running dynamic languages on
the JVM.