Neat technology, but, even as a rather serious O'Caml fan, even going so far as to use it in production ;), I tend to avoid the FF consultancy because of things like this:<p>> If you would like to keep up to date with respect to HLVM development, please subscribe to The OCaml Journal.<p>And when I go to read the online documentation?<p>> The design and implementation of this high-performance garbage collected virtual machine is described in detail in the OCaml Journal articles "Building a Virtual Machine with LLVM" from January to March 2009.<p>If you have to subscribe to a pay journal to learn all about it, chances are very good it isn't going anywhere at all.<p>Also, as something of a counterpoint to the whole "CLR missing on Linux or Mac OSX"... I've not run into many CLR compatibility issues with Mono at all. Also, they're not <i>just</i> doing the CLR; for example they've added first-class continuations (yes, that's right: call/cc!) to the mono VM; for language implementers that's rather attractive:<p><a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Apr-09.html" rel="nofollow">http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Apr-09.html</a>
"""<p>The ability to interoperate safely and at a high-level between different languages, from managed C++ to F#, has greatly accelerated development on the Microsoft platform. The resulting libraries, like Windows Presentation Foundation, are already a generation ahead of anything available on any other platform.<p>Linux and Mac OS X do not currently have the luxury of a solid foundation like the CLR. Consequently, they are composed entirely from uninteroperable components written in independent languages, from unmanaged custom C++ dialects to Objective C and Python.<p>"""<p>And that's the problem they're trying to solve. Bring some C# Microsoft love to poor dated OS X (and the like).<p>I abstain.
The virtues of the CLR are (rightly) extolled for Windows, then the lack of the CLR on Linux/OS X is cited as one justification for the HLVM. Mono is alive and well on those two platforms (notwithstanding hate from the GNU/Stallman camp).<p>Not to start another thread, but I agree with his point on WPF being a generation ahead of similar technologies on other platforms. I hope we see work start on that at some point for Mono (running on OpenGL, for example).
I love OCaml, which this virtual machine says it is based upon, but doesn't it have issues with multi-core processors? That is, doesn't it suffer from a limitation due to its garbage collector?
HLVM is targeted at high performance scientific applications. The current implementation already outperforms OCaml in several benchmarks (OCaml is more optimized for symbolic computations and sometimes 'boxes' floating point values).
Interesting exercise, but of little use: this is solving (well, trying to) a political problem with more technology. JVM is already on the table, let's use that.