D and Java [was Re: The DUB package manager]

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 05:16:29 +0000
Russel Winder <russel at winder.org.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, 2013-02-24 at 16:32 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> […]
> > Luckily, modern server hardware should support hardware
> > virtualization, and most languages/libs are pretty good at
> > cross-platform, so this one shouldn't be much of a "reason for JVM"
> > anymore like it might have been ten or so years ago.
> 
> But this is where "virtual != virtual": hardware virtualization is a
> different thing from virtual machines. The reason for JVM and PVM
> remains even in a world of server virtualization.

How so? VM is about two things: sandboxing and cross-platform.
Hardware virtualization is sandboxing without the overhead of bytecode.
As for cross-platform:

> Cross platform is
> not the application developers problem using a virtual machine as it
> is with native codes. This has not changed.
> 

Anytime you actually *need* to take a platform difference into account,
a VM will not help you. If anything it might get in your way. In all
other cases, forcing handling of platform differences onto the
application developer is a failure of library API design - using native
does not change that.