D vs VM-based platforms

[Don Clugston]

Ary Manzana wrote:
> lubosh escribió:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I wonder what you all think about the future of programming platforms. 
>> I've got a lot of code written in C# and lately I started to read more 
>> about D.
>>
>> Honestly, I feel quite refreshed to re-discover native compilation in 
>> D again.
> 
> Me too. :-)
> 
> It seems so much more lightweight than .NET framework or Java. Why 
> there's so much push on the market (Microsoft, Sun) for executing source 
> code within virtual machines? Do we really need yet another layer 
> between hardware and our code? 

I think a big reason for .NET was the Itanium. It was going to make it 
possible to write x86 apps which would run without modification when we 
all switched to Itanium. We needed a virtual machine to isolate us from 
the thing which was likely to change (the CPU).

Java had a VM so it could run on SPARC (now dead), Alpha (now dead), 
Itanium (never really alive), PowerPC, and x86.

Instead, x86 asm now runs natively on the latest Macs.