[Info-vax] The Kotlin language, something for VMS as well?

[Dirk Munk]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 7/12/2017 4:13 PM, Brett Cameron wrote:
>> Just FYI, I had a bit of a play around with Kotlin a few weeks back
>> and pretty much all the JVM stuff seems to work okay on OpenVMS with
>> Java 8 (the interactive shell has a couple of minor issues, but
>> that’s about all I’ve hit so far)...
>
> Most JVM languges should be easy to get working:
>
> Kotlin
> Scala
> Groovy
> Jython (Python) [I am rather interested in that one]
> JRuby (Ruby)
> Clojure (Lisp derivative)
> JGnat (Ada)
> Rembulan (Lua)
> Rhino or Nashorn (JavaScript) [comes with Java out the box and works]
> Renjin (R)
>
> Options!
>
> :-)
>
> Arne
>

Thank you very much Arne, this is very interesting information. I wasn't 
aware of these developments.

Let's take Jython as an example. If I'm going to use an application 
written in Python now, then it will come with all the clutter of a 
Python runtime system in its directories. Another application written in 
Python will have the same clutter, preferably with another (sub)version 
of Python.

With Jython you would only have the application in .jar files in its 
directories, perhaps a kind of Jython library as well, and run the whole 
thing with the standard JVM that you already have installed. No more 
clutter.

It also means you don't need Jython (Python!) versions for every OS, 
only for desktop operating systems. Those would be Windows, Linux and 
Mac OS.

If I understand John Reagon's contribution correctly, the Python 
developers could also build a LLVM compiler kit, add some VMS specific 
code, and build a LLVM Python compiler on VMS. With that you can produce 
Python executables. Don't know if that would be useful, but that's not 
the point for this discussion.

So my conclusion is that if you want to add a new language to VMS, makes 
sure it runs with the JVM, and/or produce a LLVM kit, adapt it somewhat 
for the VMS specifics, and build a LLVM compiler to produce executables 
for the new language. (The LLVM stuff is on x86-VMS of course!!)

Am I correct?