Erlang port to the Java Virtual Machine

Mickael Remond mickael.remond@REDACTED
Wed May 31 17:20:11 CEST 2006


* Andrew Lentvorski <bsder@REDACTED> [2006-05-30 14:37:37 -0700]:

> Robert Virding wrote:
> >Not having tail recursion is a serious problem, Erlang is not usable 
> >without it! If the underlying machine does not directly support it then 
> >you have to implement it yourself which means you have to go in at a 
> >lower level and do more work yourself.
> 
> Sure.  But the implementations of JRuby and JScheme seem to work fine 
> without support for JVM tail recursion.

It depends what you think if fine. Last time I checked Jython (Python
interpreter in Java) was just 10 time slower than Python. This probably
makes it unusable except for small scripts.
It do not even talk of tail recursion. A coworker used to Erlang tride
to program the same in other languages (such as Python). A tail
recursion loop killed the interpreter pretty quickly.

So yes, I think those implementations work as proof of concept, but I am
not sure that they are more than small toys, that will never be used in
production systems.

When you get used to Erlang, you realized that its virtual machine is
superior to the JVM and it take a big part in Erlang success.

-- 
Mickaël Rémond
 http://www.process-one.net/



More information about the erlang-questions mailing list