Eric

On Nov 27, 12:38 am, David Schmenk <dschm...@YUCH.gmail.com> wrote:
> As soon as I finish working out some issues with the garbage
> collector (I don't like automatic garbage collectors) I should have
> something to try out.

I assume you've studied NanoVM. That takes a lot of liberties that
work great on a small machine but wouldn't (or couldn't) work well on
a larger machine. The way he uses the high bit of an integer or object
reference to indicate whether it needs to be collected is both
ingenoius and perhaps dangerous. You then have only 15 bit integers
instead of 16 bit integers and that can lead to buggy code.

To me the huge elephant in the room is not the VM or the garbage
collector, but rather the class libraries. Java developers are used to
a lot of baked-in classes and methods and it's going to frustrate them
if you only have a small subset, such as that offered by NanoVM.

I don't think a discussion of performance of this Java dialect against
Apple Pascal is particularly relevant. I don't see these as
competitors. There are very few Apple Pascal developers left, based on
my unscientific observation from the newsgroups. And the number of
people who really want to play with Java on the Apple II may also be
small. Many Apple II fans grew up before the days of OOP coding and
they probably wouldn't see much reason to use Java.

But I don't want to be pessimistic because I share your enthusiasm in
the final project. It would be sweet, and almost a sin against nature
to take a super modern language and back-port it to work on a machine
that wasn't even sold any more before the first discussions of Java
ever showed up in its earliest form. There's also a little bit of
"take that, Mac" payback involved here :-)

Eric