bryanalves

The JVM has been around for a while now. It's stable, mature, and fast. Lots of languages have started to get ported over to the JVM, and things like Scala exist to make the JVM a great computing platform.

With recent dynamic language implementations on the JVM meeting or surpassing performance of the "native" VMs, why hasn't there been a move to have the JVM become the default implementation?

Jython is a great example. It's fast -- faster than CPython in a lot of cases, and it doesn't have the GIL. And it gets access to the full Java environment if it wants it, presumably including things like Clojure, JRuby, Scala, etc. where appropriate.

This seems like a win/win to me, yet there is almost no traction in this direction. I can think of a couple of reasons why this might be:

1. I'm wrong and Jython isn't actually any faster.

Even if it isn't faster, the better environment should make up for this.

2. Integration with Java land isn't that much of a benefit.

Having access to all of this stuff -- but not being forced to use it -- seems great to me. There's no real downside and lots of potential upside, including increased market penetration in enterprise environments.

3. The JVM won't benefit from dozens to hundreds of programmers from python/ruby/etc applying what they've learned in their respective languages to it.

Maybe this is a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Linux seems to do well with the "shittons of developers working simultaneously" method of doing things, why can't the JVM?

Even if the language developers don't work on the JVM at all, so what? See points 1 and 2.

4. Lagging behind by a few versions (Jython is at what, 2.5.x?) is a bigger deal than I'm imagining.

This could be made up for within a year or 2 if languages committed to the JVM as their default implementation.

5. Non-perfect compatibility breaking lots of stuff

This is a major concern, right? It's not like Python3 isn't doing the same thing right now, or seemingly every version of Ruby doing the same thing. Oh wait, they do.

Maybe the JVM isn't the right vm to standardize on; maybe LLVM would be more appropriate. I don't know. What I do know is that it seems silly for a bunch of language designers to all be having a big case of NIH and writing their own vms and bytecode interpreters.

Thoughts?

So I'm looking to put together a suite of tools put together some metrics of page load performance for my company's sites. I already know about:

* www.webpagetest.org * www.yottaa.com * Google analytics has some meaningful stuff * Internal tools for back-end performance (number/time of database hits, etc)

What other tools should I be looking at to gather a comprehensive set of metrics?

So, I'm average joe programmer. I contribute to 401k, and I have a high yield savings account for very short term stuff. I would like to start investing in something that will be usable in the short-medium term.

I don't know much at all about the stock market, and don't want to learn. I am thinking about putting some fixed amount of money per month in a single index fund (a large, broad index fund).

Is this enough in terms of diversification, given my other investments? Goal is to either:

1. Be able to take the money out in short-medium term (3-6 years maybe) as a down payment for a house 2. Go "all the way" and provide funding for an early retirement.

Is contributing $100ish per month through a standard online broker (scottrade, etrade, sharebuilder, whatever), to a single index fund a smart choice for somebody like me?

Some base stats: Age: 26 Immediate liquid capital: low 5-figures, enough for 6 months of living, in a random high-yield savings. 401k contributions: ~10k/year

The obvious "put more in 401k" I don't think applies to me. I am already contributing a pretty substantial amount, and I would like to potentially have access to the money much sooner than a 401k would allow. Picking a single index-fund seems to make sense for me, since I'm going to be doing repeated small contributions, and thus will save on brokerage costs.

AAAAAAAAND I'm rambling. Any advice would be appreciated.