New JDK 7 Feature: Support for Dynamically Typed Languages in the JVM

Charlie Nutter of JRuby did a (very long) post about invokedynamic on his blog awhile back: <a href="http://blog.headius.com/2008/09/first-taste-of-invokedynamic.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.headius.com/2008/09/first-taste-of-invokedynamic...</a>

Since this uses a new bytecode on the JVM I wonder how backwards compatibility is going to be handled?<p>I hope we don't see a painful period where people stuck with old JDKs (Mac users, that means you) are going to be unable to use the newest versions of dynamic languages. Even just having to distribute separate binaries for pre-JDK7 runtimes will be an annoyance that people in the java community have not experienced for a long time.

This should be the Java equivalent of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) built on top of the CLR.

How about continuations and TCO while we're at it?

What is JDK 7? Yet another marketing buzzword? Would it happen to run on emerged ARM-based platforms? Netbooks? iPhone? Android? Symbian? Whatever?

OT:<p>I knew it!<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727427" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727427</a><p>JRuby guys quit on Oracle and went with EngineYard. Yeah, because they knew they <i>only</i> sponsored the JSR for dynamic languages. I too would quit my day job if Sun was customizing the JVM to support my compiler better.<p>[Edit: s/ibm/oracle/]

Thank god for Instapaper (<a href="http://www.instapaper.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.instapaper.com</a>)! That's one long article that will make for fine, fine nerdy subway reading.