Will GPL Java eat into Python marketshare?

[Paul Boddie]

Maurice LING wrote:
>
> I take a simplistic view that Java bytecodes is all that is to be dealt
> with.

Well, that and things like class loading. You'll need a library
implementing the "standard" Java API, although that's never been hard
to obtain, and the official implementation will be genuinely free to
redistribute before too long as well.

> And the book "Programming for the Java Virtual Machine" by Joshua
> Engel did demonstrated in principle that it is possible to program in
> Java bytecodes. There are also other researchware which tried to compile
> other languages into Java bytecodes. I am not sure if exception handling
> etc are dealt with before bytecode level. I also envision that the core
> implementation of JVM is a big switch statement, just like in Python VM
> (the bytecode executor).

It's just an instruction set, but with some fairly "complicated"
instructions, just as you find in the Python virtual machine
instruction set - don't expect them all to be like RISC instructions,
or even traditional CISC instructions.

> Will it then be the case of adding the set of Java bytecodes into Python
> bytecodes and implementing Java bytecode operations? Or am I just
> fooling myself here?

Take a look at the code, although you might want to steer clear of the
import hooks initially:

http://www.python.org/pypi/javaclass

Paul