[geeks] Browser licensing?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 08:29:49PM -0400, Alois Hammer wrote:

> Not exactly the first questioner here or elsewhere, but I'll answer
> here: after working with what I'm *fairly* sure is every type of VM
> anyone's ever thought of coding, the top losers are JIT VMs.  Every JVM,
> .NET VM (is there a contraction for that one?) and any other JIT VM I've
> been near has been slow to load, eats lots of RAM, tends to perform one
> limited task, occasionally runs away and takes a core with it (until
> killed, if you can kill it), tends to be running code that wasn't
> designed with any kind of useful IPC in mind (not that that's the VM's
> fault, precisely), is almost always running single-threaded code (sort
> of a staple of VM design), and has a history of being reasonably easy to
> break out of, security-wise.  Sure, Java can be nice and fast *once the
> VM's running*, but it's usually not, and that's beside the point for
> most JavaScript performance cases.

Wait, you are saying that JAVA and .NET mostly run single threaded code?
That is surprising.  
 
> So far, every job I've been in, on, or near for most of the last decade
> has required daily interaction with Java apps, and now I'm starting to
> be forced into interacting with .NET.  Not only that, but most of those
> apps would have been vastly better off if they'd been coded by people
> with experience in C, or the willingness to learn C (or whatever)
> instead of writing every trivial app in Java.  My absolute worst case so
> far is a C&C system for voice recog apps whose UI was Java, and
> instantiated an *entire new JVM* for every remote app server you wanted
> to perform a batch function on.  It ran on P3 desktops with 128MB and
> Win2K.  The incompetent developers insisted it wouldn't run on anything
> other than J2SE 1.4.1 (1.5 had had a couple point releases, and 1.4.2
> had been out a while).  It didn't take long to get people to understand
> that asking it to control more than two or four app servers at a time
> was, reward-wise, sort of like hocking a loogie against a stiff wind.

It is interesting that you blame Java or the JVM for that C&C system
when Java can and does run on much smaller platforms quite acceptably,
even today.

> Maybe I'll be spectacularly wrong and V8 will be the first JIT VM I've
> ever heard of that doesn't grab absurd amounts of system resources to
> perform moderately trivial tasks (and, hey, minimum one per JS-executing
> tab, too), but I'll be fairly shocked if Google's subcontractors are the
> first people to manage it.  Sun's only been trying for... a decade and a
> half?  More?  Virtual machines as an implemented concept goes back to
> 1967, and reality is as terrible now as it was then, except that this
> time we supposedly have virtualisation instruction sets in our CPUs that
> are supposed to somehow make these things faster, and never seem to.

Employees.  V8 was made by employees, which stands to reason as there
have been rumblings about javascript in google for some time.

And you still haven't explained why it is impossible for there to be a
fast instantiating JIT VM.  Above you are comparing desktop (or perhaps
server) application startup performance, not just VM startup
performance.