This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Weiqi Gao.
Original Post: Re: OpenJDK In Ten Years
Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog
Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml
Feed Description: Sharing My Experience...
Ten years is a long time in the computer industry. Ten years ago, we are in the third year of Windows 95, a 32-bit OS for the 32-bit Intel CPUs of the time, after a Finnish student had gotten tired of running a 16-bit OS on 32-bit hardware and started to write his own.
If someone described todays computer hardware to me ten years ago, I probably would say something like "Microsoft had better fix the animation sequence at the end of Solitaire so that it's speed is not CPU frequency dependent, or it would run so fast that nobody would be able to see it. Plus, how do you play Solitaire on a 3.5-inch handheld screen."
Knowing the limitations of human imagination, any predictions we make today would certainly look silly when the time really comes. Nevertheless, we can still extrapolate and know that the following must be true ten years from now:
The OpenJDK JVM will remain a 32-bit/64-bit application running in compatibility mode on the prevalent 128-bit machines. People would have realized that porting it to 128-bit is pointless when an "int" is always 32-bit.
The OpenJDK distributions would have been split apart, with the most useful portion being maintained while the rotten part—the HTML 3.2 renderer, the com.sun.corba ORB—were cut off.
The javac compiler would become multi language front-end capable and become the focal point of all JVM languages—it will be renamed "jcc" for JVM Compiler Collection and it will support Java (30% share), Scala (15%), Groovy (50%) and other languages.
When you tell people that you develop software for the JVM, people will treat you the way we treat VB6 developers today. But in your heart, you know the JVM still provide value to your customers, just like the VB6 VM does today.
The JVM will be one of four "managed" virtual machine environments, which are the legacies of the 90's and 00's generation. The other three being:
.NET, which Microsoft would have abandoned five years earlier just like they are trying to get people off of Win32 now;
The Mozilla virtual machine, which under the guise of being part of the browser has grown to be a full featured VM;
The Parrot virtual machine, which after about 20 years would finally go 1.0, and attracting the Ruby and Python folks away from the JVM.
The JVM will remain a portable UI toolkit and be ported to all sorts of handheld and footheld devices. Instead of shunning the JVM as a ball-and-chain, device vendors will be eager to port the JVM to their devices because it would enable a whole slew of applications on the device.
The reason "managed" environments would be out of fashion is because the most important benefit it offers—garbage collection—would have been off loaded to mainstream hardware, and writing "native" applications become fashionable again. And "unmanaged" Java, Clojure, C# will be popular there as well.
I'll come back ten years from now and blog about how accurate my predictions are.
Previous Topic
