Lambda the Ultimate

Does mr. J. Gosling make money on that one patent of his when Google decides to settle?

Hmm, that's phrased wrongly. In general, when one files a patent in a company, will -or need- they pay royalty in case they make money out of it?

By Stephen O'Grady:

Oracle is willing to absorb soft costs in risk to reputation and participation rates in the Java ecosystem. [...] this suit is going to negatively impact – probably substantially – Java adoption. The enterprise technology landscape is more fragmented by the day, as it transitions from .NET or Java othodoxy to multi-language heterogeneity. Oracle’s suit will accelerate this process as it introduces for the first time legal uncertainty around the Java platform.

Java and the JVM are entrenched by now, but if there are patent issues like that buried in the essentials of the runtime system, there is a very, very real problem. Here a simple alternative implementation strategy can't avoid the patent issues, and IMHO, NOBODY should hold themselves hostage to such a language - a frickin' computer programming language!!! - going forward.

Fact is, if Java died a quick death because of this, no one will care or hardly remember in 10 or so years. There's nothing categorically special about Java (conventional Algol/C family language adding GC) or about a VM implemented language (sorry, pretty trivial to build a fast stack based VM - hell, if I can do it...) or even about a JIT (although a few Java implementations are very clever in their implementations). JIT's are actually hard (performance quality criteria drives this kind of infrastructure, and performance doesn't have any real upper bound regarding customers and competitors), but again, neither new nor unique to the Java community.

Totally skipping arguments about the virtues of software patents, it's just prudent to pick tools with longevity and unhindered by, frankly, patent and licensing BS like this.

And FYI, I got turned onto Java early visiting out at Sun circa '96 and adopted server side Java a few months later with the alpha implementation of Sun's 'Jeeves' servlet engine. So I don't have any real beef with Java - far from it.

S.

That's the damnable thing -- there is no guarantee that any implementation technique is unhindered by "patent and licensing BS". Would that there were. You don't know if there's a troll under the bridge until he comes out, even if you built the bridge yourself.

From this end I just cannot understand how Oracle could be so blatantly anti-competitive and petty. This is roughly equivalent to dumping tons of toxic waste into the pond in which all Java vendors live. Oracle may have launched this lawsuit knowing they wouldn't make much money in the end from it, but for the opportunity to grind Google to a halt. I don't think they are prepared for the second-order effects this will have.

This will undoubtedly slow down Java adoption and make vendors consider other alternatives. This lawsuit will drag on for three years at least, and in that time the rats will leave the sinking ship...

Sorry Java, this may finally be the last bit of weight that drags your horse out of the race.

The recent post sparked my interest, and I read up on Dalvik internals to see where it stands as a JVM at the moment.

CEO summary: A) A Dex file uncompressed is a few percentages better than the compressed Java class file compiled from. It achieves this by maximizing sharing in several constant pools. B) The Dalvik byte code interpreter is some factors (even when JITted) slower than most other interpreters. C) The Dalvik machine is register based versus the stack based version of Sun.

Now, the second amazes me and I wonder: Is that because of the extra levels of indirection introduced by compressing it?

[ Changed order to factor. Big whoops. ]