At the recent JVM Language Summit, Oracle revealed some of its upcoming plans for the Java Virtual Machine. First up: support and interoperability with more languages. “We want a VM that will continue to be polyglot, that will interoperate with unmanaged languages, implement well-managed languages,” said John Rose, Oracle JVM architect. “Maybe in the next decade or so we’ll see C programs or C++ programs running in managed mode on top of the JVM. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
In addition, the company hopes to support trends towards strong abstractions, simplified data models, Java-on-Java, density, scaling and microservices. “We also want to be able to do tiny microservices,” said Rose, “maybe running a few of them in the JVM or maybe a million of them in the JVM but independently.” Other goals include a uniform model, memory efficiency with tuneable data layouts, optimization, and post-threading with confined, immutable data and granular concurrency.