

Ask HN: How much would it cost to create a new development stack?  - lukev

I'm entirely sold on the idea of VMs. The idea of multiple languages compiling to a target bytecode running on a cross-platform, high-performance VM is in my opinion one of the biggest advances in software development in the last two decades.<p>The CLR is technically superior, but is not really free, and not entirely cross platform.<p>But with Oracle starting to clamp down on Java, it occurs to me that there's no truly unencumbered VM out there.<p>Is now a good opportunity for someone to step in and build a third option, completely open, incorporating lessons learned from both the CLR and the JVM? Of course, it would be an absolutely monumental task - but not impossible. How many developers would it take? Maybe 50, working for 2-3 years, to get a usable first cut and basic standard libraries? Paying them an average salary of 100k, that's "only" 15 million dollars. Not to mention all the open source contributions - this is the type of project that could attract OS contributors like moths to a flame.<p>$15 million is a lot, but its negligible compared to the economic and cultural impact of a totally open VM superior to both the JVM and the CLR. It seems well within reach, if funded by a non-profit trust established by a large number of invested firms. Hell, there's probably a few individuals wealthy enough to pull it off, and who are philosophically inclined to support such a project.<p>Is there something wrong with my reasoning, here? Do you think there's any chance we might actually see a project like this take off? Would you follow/contribute to such a project?
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wmf
I would expect the cost of building a self-sustaining ecosystem (including
libraries, books, conferences, etc.) to be 10x the cost of building the
platform itself. Having a charismatic leader like DHH or Shuttleworth would
allow much of the ecosystem-building to be offloaded onto the community.

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stonemetal
LLVM, Squeak, Erlang, CPython, pypy, Rubinius, parrot, several of the
javascript VMs all "truly unencumbered VM". If I were going to start a massive
library so everyone wants to use my VM project today I would start with either
LLVM, parrot or pypy probably in that order.

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spooneybarger
the squeak vm will probably be replaced at some point by cog:
<http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/>

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drlisp
>>Maybe 50, working for 2-3 years, to get a usable first cut and basic
standard libraries? Paying them an average salary of 100k, that's "only" 15
million dollars.

I think you are underestimating the man-hours and cost. You will need a Google
or some other tech giant to engineer this. Why not improve openJDK?

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spooneybarger
correct me if i'm wrong but from what i've read about the patents on this,
some improvements might open you up to patent issues.

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spooneybarger
While slow right now... parrot shows some promise:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine>

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lukev
Interesting. Do you know what the state of Parrot libraries is? (It's not
evident on their website). Unfortunately, a VM/environment has to be
bootstrapped in this regard - nobody wants to write their own socket library
just to build a webapp.

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spooneybarger
i haven't been following close enough to know. if someone really wanted a new
stack, the parrot vm is just what immediately jumps into my mind as it is
designed for running multiple languages and having them interact.

