Is the JVM low level?

[Pierpaolo Bernardi]

> 
> People are talking as if the JVM is a "low level" VM. I don't see that.
> What assembly languages do you know of that presume garbage collection?
> What assembly language has an "invoke method" primitive? The JVM is
> actually pretty high level, in my opinion. I would say that it is
> sufficiently "low level" that it is not tied to a particular language as
> a VM that just ran "Lisp code" would be (although the JVM is obviously
> optimized for Java). GNU has a free JVM implementation and we can
> optimize it for Lisp. This running code will serve as an example to the
> researchers at IBM and the standardizers at ISO or ANSI. It will also
> serve as a portable JVM in the case that we can't get our extensions
> widely adopted.

The JVM is low-level enough to be understandable to a C programmer.
It is high level enough to be useless for anything which has more 
than superficial differences from Java.

Also, at least three Lisps on JVM have been made.  Their performance suck.

> 
>  Paul Prescod
> 

Pierpaolo Bernardi.