D vs Java

[Roberto Mariottini]

In article <dvn3fd$q65$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
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>This portability isn't the result of a VM, it's the result of cleaning up 
>all the undefined and implementation defined behaviors in the language.

I still think the VM has its own part. Think to having backends for IA32, IA64,
AMD64, PowerPC, SPARC, ARM and so on. They will have their bugs and special
cases acording to the underlying architecture.

The "compile once and run everywhere" thing for Java is literally true.

>D is about halfway in between C++ and Java in this regard. It could be 
>better. 

Sure, this will make D highly portable.
But I think the VM will win anyway. Because I am lazy.
I don't want to buy/download, install and test 4 different (cross-)compilers for
my 4 systems. And I don't want to compile my program 4 times.
If one compiler can do it, with acceptable performance, I will use the
one-compiler solution.

I think there are three categories:

- Scripting languages, for quick tricks (Python, Ruby)
- VM-based languages, for maximum portability (Java, C#)
- CPU-compiled languages, for maximum efficency (D, C++, C)

And there is enough space for all.

Ciao

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