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Comment by jbevain | Hacker News Reader

CIL - just like the LLVM IR - if human readable, is not really meant to be written by hand, unlike Java. Not sure what you mean here.

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LLVM IR is much less verbose than CIL, isn't class-based, and on the whole is much simpler. The CIL's complexity makes it less flexible than something like LLVM IR or JVM bytecode; this is one of the reasons alternative languages have flourish on the JVM, whereas the CLR only has C# and F#, and F# had to rely on the developers' influence at Microsoft to get the runtime to support some of its features.

Err... there's more than C# and F# targeting the CLR. Even just from Microsoft (VB.Net and Managed C++), but there are a heap more.

I said flourished. Are there any non-MS languages on the CLR that have achieved equal popularity to that of Clojure, Scala or Groovy on the JVM?

> achieved equal popularity to that of Clojure, Scala or Groovy on the JVM

Clojure and Scala seem to be tied for 2nd place popularity behind Java, but Groovy's lagging far behind. Were you looking at the bintray-maven download stats at https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics for Groovy when you put it in with Scala and Clojure? Even tho those stats show 660,000 downloads of Groovy over the past month, click on country and you'll see 625,000 of them came from a server in China, only 12,000 from the US, and 2000 from Germany, the 3 biggest countries. Obviously the China stats are fabricated. Groovy's true popularity is far behind Scala and Clojure.

I was just listing what I assumed were the top 3 most popular non-Java languages on the JVM. But perhaps it's already been overtaken by Kotlin or Ceylon.

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