John Rose @ Sun: John Rose's weblog at Sun Microsystems

It has been a busy day, of course. For those interested, I have posted the talk Brian Goetz and I gave on the Da Vinci Machine Project. We divided our attention between a “grand vision” of what VMs are and where they are going, and the exciting particulars of how invokedynamic and method handles work. (Warning: You’ll find lots of transition slides in the deck; I have not had time to condense them back to their combined versions.)

By contrast, yesterday’s talk at CommunityOne was more of a call for participation in the project, with a little motivational logic and history thrown in. The maximum amount of gory detail will be in Thursday’s talk called JSR 292 Cookbook.

Although I spent much of the day preparing for my own presentation, I rounded out the evening by attending some other talks. I was edified by a vigorous (if at times skeptical) discussion of interface injection, moderated by Tobias Ivarsson, who is prototyping it. The Collections Connection talk by Google folks was fun, and I was drooling over the new data structures—but I wonder did they talk to Rich Hickey and think about pulling in some of his finely crafted functional data structures. Google is using the builder pattern to create immutable values; I wish we knew how to integrate this into Java, since there are so many use cases for it, starting with formatted strings. (In this vein F# is working on computation expressions; I wonder what Scala has?)

The day ended with a rousing interaction with HotSpot JVM customers at the Meet the HotSpot Team BOF. Too few engineers and too many great (even urgent) ideas. I am glad the JDK is open-source now, so the community can influence the engineering priorities by voting with code.