NV: What does that say about the JVM’s project’s life
expectancy? Will it run in parallel with MoarVM’s development? Does all
this forecasts Parrot’s demise?
JW: The JVM is playing that difficult “second backend” role. Going from one target VM to two exposes all kinds of assumptions, such as places where things are not sufficiently well abstracted and so forth. Such abstractions are not easy to design because you’re not only thinking about how to hide differences, but how to convey enough semantic information downwards in order to allow good code generation.
Having the second VM that is already mature and well established is a huge help. OK, I did manage to segfault the JVM thanks to the odd invokedynamic bug I managed to hit upon. But by and large, if something is wrong, I can be pretty sure that the JVM itself will not be to blame. So, the JVM porting leads the way.
That naturally means we’ll get to a rather complete Rakudo on JVM some way ahead of getting there with MoarVM. The work on the two is going on in parallel. The JVM work has already blazed the “how to port Rakudo” trail, so really the MoarVM project complexity is much more tied up with the VM itself, not with working out how to get things ported to it.
full interview on Josettorama
JW: The JVM is playing that difficult “second backend” role. Going from one target VM to two exposes all kinds of assumptions, such as places where things are not sufficiently well abstracted and so forth. Such abstractions are not easy to design because you’re not only thinking about how to hide differences, but how to convey enough semantic information downwards in order to allow good code generation.
Having the second VM that is already mature and well established is a huge help. OK, I did manage to segfault the JVM thanks to the odd invokedynamic bug I managed to hit upon. But by and large, if something is wrong, I can be pretty sure that the JVM itself will not be to blame. So, the JVM porting leads the way.
That naturally means we’ll get to a rather complete Rakudo on JVM some way ahead of getting there with MoarVM. The work on the two is going on in parallel. The JVM work has already blazed the “how to port Rakudo” trail, so really the MoarVM project complexity is much more tied up with the VM itself, not with working out how to get things ported to it.
full interview on Josettorama
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