[M3devel] Just putting it out there...

[Coleburn, Randy]

I don't think the sources are available to the M3 JVM, but Olaf would know best on this.

If they aren't available, we could check with Farshad Nayeri, one of the original owners/developers of Critical Mass, to see if he might consent to make them available, but this would be a long shot.

Regards,
Randy Coleburn

-----Original Message-----
From: m3 at sol42.com [mailto:m3 at sol42.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 10:15 AM
To: m3devel
Subject: Re: [M3devel] Just putting it out there...

On 20 Jul 2010, at 15:36, Mark Wickens wrote:
> Yes, after I'd written the email and thought about it I realised it was
> a pretty stupid idea.

Well, not stupid at all.

Java may suck but the JVM certainly does not.  There is a lot of interest now in compiling languages other than Java on the JVM, which has turned out to be a sort of universal runtime.  Only that it was designed with Java in mind, and you would end up with something *like* Modula-3, not Modula-3 itself: what you can do in JVM "assembly" is limited, no PACKED types, no BITS x FOR y .. z, LOOPHOLE may or may not be always possible, UNTRACED would be problematic, pointer arithmetic in UNSAFE modules might require JNI and who knows what else, forget about <*EXTERNAL*> C calls, full interoperability with Java would require supporting Java interfaces (at the language level I think)... and these are just the few I can think of right now.

On the other hand I would really like to code in this superset-of-a-subset of Modula-3 and run it on a JVM.

Regarding the Critical Mass JVM described in Threads 3, are the sources available?

Regards.
-Daniel