D vs. C#

[David Brown]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 08:54:01PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

>> VirtualBox is a nice
>> part-open-source virtualization product, and they stated that the
>> software virtualization they implemented is faster than today's
>> hardware virtualization.
>
> I find that hard to believe.

Simon Peyton-Jones spoke at the recent HOPL (History of Programming
Languages) conference.  His group was originally trying to come up with
better hardware to directly execute the abstract machine used in haskell.
They problem they found is that because of the enormous advances in general
purpose processors, even a simple simulation of the virtual machine on a
modern PC ran faster than the hardware machine they could build.

I'm not sure if this applies to the x86 that virtual-box simulates, but it
could easily be the case for something like JVM.  A software JVM on a fast
desktop machine is much faster than a hardware JVM on a small embedded
system.

David