InfoQ Homepage Language Design Content on InfoQ
-
Dynamic Invocation Runs on OpenJDK
John Rose, a Hotspot VM developer at Sun, has announced the first successful execution of the 'invokedynamic' instruction on the OpenJDK VM. Dynamic invocation is an important feature for adapting dynamic languages to the JVM.
-
Interview: Neal Gafter Discusses Closures, Language Features and Optional Typing
In this interview from QCon London 2008, Neal Gafter discusses upcoming language features in Java 7, superpackages, what closures are, the differences between the three major closures proposals (CICE, FCM and BGGA), optional typing systems for dynamic languages, and the next major language.
-
Interview: Guy Steele on Programming Languages
Floyd Marinescu, co-founder of InfoQ, interviewed Guy Steele, a Sun Fellow working for the Programming Language Research Group at Sun, about programming languages, the lessons to be learned from the past and what to expect from the future.
-
Presentation: Erlang - software for a concurrent world
We get more and more cores in our CPUs, but does our software run linearly faster? In most cases - no. We've hit a trend change when it comes to faster CPUs. We'll get more and more cores, but each core will be slower as the number of cores increase. In his talk, Joe Armstrong introduces Erlang and the ideas of Concurrent Oriented Programming which is one way to solve the problem.
-
Do Language Specific Libraries Belong in .NET?
There is a lot of basic functionality the .NET platform does not provide. For example, there is no built-in way to read CSV files, copy directories, or work with zip files. Well actually there is, but only if you dig deep enough.
-
Call for Microsoft to Release Spec#
Last month Greg Young initiated a grass roots effort asking for Microsoft to release Spec#.
-
JSR-292 Early Draft Review Announced
The early draft review of JSR-292 has been released. JSR-292 defines the 'invokedynamic' instruction, a bytecode instruction to assist in the implementation of dynamic languages on JVM.
-
Presentation: The Overlooked Power of Javascript
In this presentation from JAOO 2007, Glenn Vanderburg takes look at Javascript, where it came from and how powerful it actually is. After a look at the resurgence of Javascript for the browser and Flash, powerful libraries like jQuery or Prototype are introduced.
-
Using JRuby to generate Code for the JVM
While JRuby's performance keeps increasing, there are still algorithms that are faster if implemented in Java. We look at different approaches to solve this: RubyInline for JRuby, generating bytecode with a JRuby DSL and a new subset of Ruby called Duby.
-
Implicit line continuations in Visual Basic
Line continuation characters have always been a wart on the VB syntax. Unlike languages in the Pascal and C families, Visual Basic does not require a trailing semi-colon to denote the end of a statement. The trade-off for this is that it does need a character to indicate when the statement does not end. Paul Vic is proposing to eliminate continuation characters in most common cases.