It’s a kind of lame blog post that boils down to, “Here, read this other blog post,” but — if you are working in a VM-based language — and, if you’re reading JavaWorld, I think you are — you really ought to read this post from Neil McAllister on InfoWorld. He discusses the place that we’ve found ourselves — with VMs supporting multiple languages, and running across multiple platforms. He also offers a vision of the future that he admits is unlikely but intriguing:The other possibility would be for VM technology to go even more mainstream than it is now, and become more closely identified with the underlying operating system. One could argue that Microsoft is already doing this with .Net, by pushing for managed-code applications to be considered first-class citizens alongside traditional Win32 code. Why Sun never did the same with Solaris and Java is something of a mystery.… If every OS shipped with some form of generic VM, capable of executing code written in any number of languages, the last distinctions between native code and VM managed code would essentially disappear. Furthermore, application developers would be freed to concentrate on user-facing code, while OS and VM developers could collaborate on trickier low-level topics, such as better support for parallel processing.The bolded bit (emphasis mine) is intriguing because that in fact is the exact opposite of Sun’s original intention for the JVM — no OS was to get special treatment. But would it make more sense in today’s environment, with Sun making game efforts to push Solaris adoption? Software Development