The perennial question:

Jeff Sutherland is one of the few original signatories of the agile manifesto who has enough integrity to allow agile methods to grow beyond its founding members. In this blog he points out the benefits of Ruby running on the Java VM. He later suggests that SmallTalk should also consider the same approach. I wonder if him and James Robertson have ever talked?

We looked at this a long time ago, and the answer is, it's not really feasible. Ruby is an interpreted language, so the speed hit it takes from living on a static optimized VM is theoretical. With Smalltalk, it would be very real. There are an awful lot of dynamic behaviors that would either be lost outright or run like a dog on the JVM. The same holds largely true of the CLR, btw.

Sure, Sun is talking about adding some dynamic language support to the VM. The process to make those mods is long and slow though - and telling customers to take a 30% hit in performance in order to live on a different VM just doesn't sound that useful.

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