why the JVM is not my favorite execution environment

What caught my attention the most is that the real title of this paper for the author is “why the JVM is not my favorite execution environment”. The reason for this was that people in general are now after portability, compactness, efficiency, security, interoperability and flexibility for language independent platforms and the JVM has been one of the most outstanding of this platforms for several years now.

I would not have thought to use the JVM for other things rather than java and when I first learned that the JVM was used to run some other languages I was quite surprised. I consider only natural that the only or most optimized language with the JVM is Java since it was designed specifically for it and that it cannot easily represent some characteristics of other languages such as reference parameters, varargs, function pointers and some other things.

And here is where the CLI comes in handy. Contrary to the JVM, the CLI was built from the beginning as a target for multiple languages. It has an instruction pointer, an evaluation stack, an array of local variables and incoming arguments, local memory pool, return state handle, a security descriptor and finally a compiler. It is more complete than the JVM as we could see and with its own method system; I think that it is this granularity of the CLI that gives it the advantage over other platforms to interact with other languages. 

Overall, I don’t believe it is possible to fit perfectly all the languages, but CLI definitely has an advantage. I think that this paper is important to understand some of the mechanics of the CLI that can be useful for our final project and gave us some clarity over what we are trying to achieve with our final project.