Lambda the Ultimate

hi everybody,

did you notice that...

Java is now GPL! [tra la la la]

but...

I am not sure what it means for Java to be distributed under GPL. I reckon the first thing is, it can be distributed with Linux distros right away. was that impossible before?

the second question, I hope, is more important. can there be forks of the Java legacy now?

more specifically, *ahem* if now, can we implement a VM that satisfies the JVM specification but allows more? if not, consider the question hypothetical.

so that, Java will run on the VM, but [a narrow example] there will be other bytecode operations...

you know, things like JSR 292... invokedynamic, hotswapping...

what would be, in your opinion, the most significant change you want to see in the current JVM?

[don't mind me, I'm a newbie, I'll just follow the discussion. but even though it is not a language topic, some things, like the closure proposal, I suppose, are relevant.]

Ben Weidermann and William Cook of UT Austin have put together a paper on translating procedural code into SQL.

From the abstract:

"Transparent persistence promises to integrate programming languages
and databases by allowing procedural programs to access
persistent data with the same ease as non-persistent data. When the
data is stored in a relational database, however, transparent persistence
does not naturally leverage the performance benefits of relational
query optimization.We present a program analysis that combines
the benefits of both approaches by extracting database queries
from programs with transparent access to persistent data."

You can find the paper here.