Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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Arithmetic operations on numbers are not polymorphic, but polymorphism has nothing to do with static typing per se. You're being confused here by the special treatment the JVM gives to primitives, special treatment that was needed to avoid the boxing/unboxing costs, but that's a separate discussion and note that hidden boxing/unboxing costs can also happen in Scala, which treats numbers as Objects.

Disregarding primitives, the JVM doesn't give a crap about what types you push/pop the stack or what values you return.

invokeDynamic is nothing more than an invokeVirtual or maybe an invokeInterface, with the difference that the actual method lookup logic (specific to the Java language) is overridden by your own logic, otherwise it's subject to the same optimizations that the JVM is able to perform on virtual method calls, like code inlining:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/pres/200910-VMIL.pdf

> ... because the JVM was too statically typed at its core

Nice hand-waving of an argument, by throwing a useless Wikipedia link in there as some kind of appeal to authority.

I can do that too ... the core of the JVM (the HotSpot introduced in 1.4) is actually based on Strongtalk, a Smaltalk implementation that used optional-typing for type-safety, but not for performance:

http://strongtalk.org/ + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot#History

> Nice hand-waving of an argument, by throwing a useless Wikipedia link in there as some kind of appeal to authority

No need to get agressive over this :) I disagreed with your first comment regarding the dynamic nature of the JVM, and replied trying to explain why.

I posted the wikipedia link not as kind of an "appeal to authority", but to give the readers a full listing of bytecode instructions, so that they can check what I was saying for themselves.

> Disregarding primitives, the JVM doesn't give a crap about what types you push/pop the stack or what values you return.

It depends how you see things: the JVM can't possibly provide instructions for every possible user type, so apart from primitives, the other object types are passed around as pointers or references, but whenever you try to do something other than storing/loading them on the stack, the type checking kicks in, ensuring that the reference being manipulated has the right types.

For instance, the putfield instruction doesn't just take the field name where the top of the stack is going to get stored. It also takes the type of the field as a parameter, to ensure that the types are compatible.

Constrast this to Python's bytecode, where the equivalent STORE_NAME (or the other variants) doesn't ask you to provide type informations.

But then again, we might be splitting hairs here: since this type checking is happening at runtime (when the JVM is running your code), you could indeed question calling it "static typing", which is usually performed at compile time (an is partially performed by the java compiler for example).

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