Hacker News Reader

Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

Also known as The Best Virtual Machine. It would be nice to see the 64-bit Mono vs JVM vs V8 (or whatever monkey it's called this time) in a year or so. .NET CLR was already destroying every other on Win (even before RyuJIT and SIMD and native compilation), now Linux will be covered as well.

View on HN

I'd like to hear this "best" substantiated against HotSpot. I enjoy writing code on the CLR, but I'm not aware of strong performance arguments in its favor relative to HotSpot.

That's kind of the million dollar question. It's always been faster than HotSpot... On Windows. And no-one cared. It'll be very interesting when people start to get some sense of the relative performance characteristics on Linux.

It's a hard problem, though. For instance, async IO is relatively faster on Windows vs sync IO. Whilst threads and processes are pretty expensive on Windows compared to Linux.

I think the JavaScript virtual machines are amazing. Thanks to browser speed wars, they pulled out a trick that I would not have thought possible - making JavaScript fast as hell.

Calling V8 "whatever monkey" is a bit ignorant.

Oh, I haven't said that JavaScript is a good language :)

I believe the comment meant V8 and {Spider,Trace,Jäger}Monkey (the Mozilla JS engine), which nowadays even beats V8 in some benchmarks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_%28software%29#Tra...

Unfortunately it pushed the industry on the wrong path. Now everyone is coming app with transpilable super-sets and some folks are even pushing the unmaintainable code to the previously safe server-side (node, meteor etc.).

Yes.

Just look what Lars Bak did with JavaScript.

If he would work on the CLR, things could get really awesome.

You mean it could become as awesome as the HotSpot JVM, which was originally based on the StrongTalk VM for SmallTalk, which was in turn based on the Self implementation from Sun Labs? (hint: Lars Bak worked on all of the above)

http://www.strongtalk.org/ http://www.selflanguage.org/

I don't know how much hacks he had to use for the JVM and V8 that could be left out in the CLR.

AFAIK he didn't create those things from scratch, he had to use the Java, SmallTalk, Self and JavaScript specs that were already out in the wild.

JavaScript code is not unmaintainable.

Don't forget that JavaScript is singlethreaded, which makes a lot of things (e.g. GC) easier. I think if JVM or CLR was purely singlethreaded they would gain some more speed.

Web Workers don't as multithreading, they are more like isolated processes than threads.

".NET CLR was already destroying every other on Win "

Really? Care to provide some details?

interesting. usually the top comment is a little more substantial than an unsupported adversarial statement of opinion.

You are wholly correct but even still, sadly, you can expect a barrage of down votes for stating the truth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com