invokedynamic: Is It What We Really Need? - JVM Languages

Message from discussion invokedynamic: Is It What We Really Need?

John Wilson

More options May 13, 2:09 pm

From: "John Wilson" <tugwil...@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 19:09:46 +0100

Local: Tues, May 13 2008 2:09 pm

Subject: Re: [jvm-l] Re: invokedynamic: Is It What We Really Need?

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On 5/13/08, Patrick Wright <pdoubl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > I think it's unfortunate that the JSR was started with a solution
> > (invokedynamic) rather than a problem (implementing dynalangs on the
> > JVM is hard). This is not reflection on John who came to the JSR long
> > after it was created.

> See Gilad's old blog entry at
> http://blogs.sun.com/gbracha/entry/invokedynamic and other blogs from
> around that time. "Last winter we had a meeting with various people
> who work on such languages - things like Groovy, Perl, Python/Jython.
> Our conclusion was that the most practicable thing was to support
> dynamically typed method invocation at the byte code level." There are
> some other notes about that meeting floating around on the web
> somewhere that were published at the time. If this list had existed
> then, we'd have more information about what was discussed back then
> and why they came up with the invokedynamic idea.

Yes I remember the meeting very well (I wasn't at the meeting but I
was already working on Groovy when it happened). At the time we
expected it to be the beginning of an engagement with Sun on the
problems of getting dynamic languages to run efficiently on the JVM.
The invokedynamic proposal came as something of a surprise to us it
was, and remains, difficult to see how we might have made use of it.
Bracha was not very forthcoming with details and moved on to other
things before he was able to enter into a dialogue.

This mailing list has made a huge difference and it's been very
valuable to be able to exchange information with others who share the
problem. Charlie has done a great job here.

I understand from postings on this and the Groovy list that the
current proposal does not include a new bytecode so perhaps my
original opinion of the utility of invokedynamic was not completely
wrong.

We must, of course, wait for the publication of the proposal before
coming to an informed position this.

John Wilson

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