JVM and the CLI

[Bryan]

Hello all,

Does anyone know if the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) implements the
Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) standard?

 

[Chris Uppal]

Does anyone know if the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) implements the
Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) standard?

Yes, quite a few people know that ;-)

Me for instance -- it doesn't.

-- chris

 

[Bryan]

Wow... thanks Chris for the either funny or rude answer to my question
(I'm not sure how you meant it). Do you know if Sun plans on doing so
or if people will just stick with something like the IKVM if they want
a CLI compliant java virtual machine?

 

[Oliver Wong]

Do you know if Sun plans on doing so [support CLI in the JVM]
or if people will just stick with something like the IKVM if they want
a CLI compliant java virtual machine?

I'd be surprised if Sun officially supports CLI in the JVM. They're kind
of competing technologies. That said, Java is GPL now, so maybe somebody out
is already working on adding CLI support to their fork of the JVM.

- Oliver

 

[Bryan]

Oliver,

Thanks for your comment. I'm thinking maybe that's what Mono is trying
to do with IKVM, but I'm not sure. I guess it all depends on how well
the CLI specs match up with Sun's JVM specs...

Bryan

Do you know if Sun plans on doing so [support CLI in the JVM]
or if people will just stick with something like the IKVM if they want
a CLI compliant java virtual machine?

I'd be surprised if Sun officially supports CLI in the JVM. They're kind
of competing technologies. That said, Java is GPL now, so maybe somebody out
is already working on adding CLI support to their fork of the JVM.

- Oliver

 

[Mike Schilling]

Do you know if Sun plans on doing so [support CLI in the JVM]
or if people will just stick with something like the IKVM if they want
a CLI compliant java virtual machine?

I'd be surprised if Sun officially supports CLI in the JVM. They're
kind of competing technologies. That said, Java is GPL now, so maybe
somebody out is already working on adding CLI support to their fork of the
JVM.

Easier sad than done, I would think, if you're trying to support both
completely. Not so bad if you're just trying to run both sorts of
application to some approximation of "successfully".

 

[Chris Uppal]

Wow... thanks Chris for the either funny or rude answer to my question
(I'm not sure how you meant it).

I was being facetious -- calling it "funny" would be flattery, but it wasn't
intended to be rude ;-)

Do you know if Sun plans on doing so
or if people will just stick with something like the IKVM if they want
a CLI compliant java virtual machine?

I'm pretty sure that there is no sense in which a chunk of software can be both
a JVM and a CLI implementation. More precisely, I can imagine (just) a chunk
of software which provided both interfaces, but there wouldn't be a lot of
point. JVM and CLI have rather a lot of conceptual similarity, but are
different in almost every detail. (Caveat: I know the JVM spec reasonably
well, but have nothing like the same knowledge of the CLI)

Of course, both Java/JVM and C#/.NET are general programming languages; so
either could be used to /implement/ the other; but that's not the same thing at
all. (I hadn't heard of IKVM before, but from a /very/ quick skim of the
website, it appears to be a JVM implemented /in/ .NET)

-- chris

 

[Bryan]

Cool. Thanks to everyone for the responses. I'm not new to Java, nor
am I new to programming in general. However, I've never taken the time
to dive into how exactly compilers work and such, so this has been a
learning time for me. Thanks again for everyone's useful comments.

Bryan

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

Does anyone know if the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) implements the
Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) standard?

Translators exist:

http://www.mainsoft.com/products/vmw_j2ee.aspx

Arne