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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/13/2017 4:37 AM, Dirk Munk wrote:
> 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)
>>

> 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?

I don't think there is any silver bullet, but I do see some advantages
of the JVM model.

Native languages will typical be:

language A
    large runtime for A
    database drivers etc. for A
language B
    large runtime for B
    database drivers etc. for B
language C
    large runtime for C
    database drivers etc. for C

JVM languages will typical be:

Java
    huge Java runtime
    database drivers etc. for Java
language A
    small runtime for A
language B
    small runtime for B
language C
    small runtime for C

I don't know much about how LLVM works. But I thought it was
more of a compiler backend meaning that it would make it much
easier to produce a native language for a platform, but that
it would not really change the deployment model. But I may
be wrong.

Arne