graal

>"That said, I don't mind reinventing the wheel in new ways - every time our wheels get better and better. But perhaps they could get better faster with fewer steps backwards with a little schooling on the foundations of our field." You may be interested in Graal/Truffle. One of the main aims is to make it a playground for experimenting with programming language design by reducing the work that goes into the underpinnings of these new languages. It's also meant to offer fairly decent performance. https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69#.n... https://github.com/graalvm/truffle/blob/master/README.md

Before anyone gets too excited, make sure you look at what a compiler using Truffle actually looks like, and remember that Java is far from an ideal language for writing a compiler. I'll use their SimpleLanguage (their primary tutorial lang) as an example. Parser [1] shows how lack of sum types makes code messy. Lots of "factory.createStringLiteral" kind of calls. At least Java has a mature parser generator. Implementing interpreter nodes [2] requires a pretty large amount of boilerplate, each individual node is relegated to its own file, some classes are littered with probably autogenerated getters/setters. While functional languages can be too terse, Java shows its exceptional verbosity here. [1] https://github.com/graalvm/truffle/blob/master/truffle/com.o... [2] https://github.com/graalvm/truffle/tree/master/truffle/com.o...

Is it fashionable to bash java ? What about https://github.com/graalvm/truffle or https://bitbucket.org/allr/fastr/wiki/Home or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo ? There is serious innovation happening in java land (through Oracle - without talking about Clojure, etc.) Java EE exists because of the need to support large legacy, enterprise customers. For those who are starting out in Java web frameworks, people usually use Spring or Spring Bootstrap (and sometimes the newer Java 8 only http://sparkjava.com/).