[Coco] Java on the CoCo (was Perl PL for OS/9)

[Christian Lesage]

It would be technically feasible to port the NanoVM Java virtual machine 
to the CoCo, but I doubt you would have time to do that since you only 
have time to learn one language.

Anyway, for those interested in this VM, here's what I found. Originally 
written for the AVR (ATMega) family of microcontrollers, NanoVM was has 
been ported to the 6502, so it could certainly be ported to the 6809. 
The VM itself is written in C and occupies 8kB of ROM space on the AVR 
platform (don't how much space on the 6502). It's just a VM though; you 
don't get the standard Java class libraries, but you get OOP and 
automatic garbage collection, which are two nice features I'd really 
like to have in a language that the CoCo could run. In addition, 
bytecode-compiled programs are very compact.

But how fast would it be on a CoCo 3? I'd be happy if it was as fast as 
interpreted BASIC.

I've just sent a message to the guy who ported it to the 6502 because I 
can't find the archive he once made publicly available. If he sends it 
to me, I will try  NanoVM on my C64 and report the results to this list. 
I wanna see how "fast" it runs on a 1-MHz 6502. I guess we could double 
that performance on a 1.8-MHz 6809.

Christian


TP Reitzel wrote:
> Here's the bottom line. I'm busy. Aren't we all? ;)
>
> I want to learn ONE programming language with modern features that's potentially capable of running on older 8-bit/16-bit architectures such as the CoCo.  I want this computer language to have scripting and functional programming features as well as traditional procedural capability. Perl6 (Rakudo on Parrot or Mildew) is one option if an embedded version were available. Personally, I also like Lua. Fortunately, a project has been started by developers working on an embedded version of Lua,  https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/elua-dev .  Maybe, this discussion should be generalized to include modern compilers on newer architectures generating intermediate/assembly code for older architectures as well. However, I ONLY have time to learn ONE language now and into the foreseeable future. TIA
>
>