> It's the result of man-centuries (man-millennia?) of work, yes, and as a result is really, really impressive. But imagine if that much work had been put into something fundamentally great, like Smalltalk or Lisp, rather than something fundamentally okay like Java.
The eternal irony of this is the current JVM---HotSpot---was a Smalltalk VM that Sun bought. It was an attempt to commercialize some of the work done (also at Sun) on the Self language [1].
Well, "an attempt to commercialise" seems to me to trivialise it a bit.
The fact is that the Self research uncovered some pretty interesting things around optimisation... at the time optimisers were pretty much based on the research done in the '70's when structured languages were still quite new-and-all. The Self work uncovered that those assumptions were really quite bad when it came to OO environments. OO-structured programmes behaved quite differently at runtime. Indeed, one of the most surprising (then) results was that you really couldn't optimise all that well at compile-time, but that you needed continuous runtime analysis and optimisation do anything really effective. But when you do, then it's hella effective! Remember that we were still in an era when byte-code interpreters were viewed (mostly rightly) as woefully slow and inefficient.
Sun had part-funded the Self research for quite a number of years (>5? if memory serves me) so when they found themselves with a bytecode interpreter that really needed some serious help there was a natural fit, and why should they not have gained some advantage out of some pure research work they had funded?
As I recall it, most of the Self research was done at Stanford. Sun just provided money, and only much later in the project's lifetime, a home in Sun Labs ("Church" side of Sun).
(All this is purely from memory, so I might have misremembered bits of it - I can go upstairs and dig out all those old OOPSLA conference proceedings if it matters.)
The eternal irony of this is the current JVM---HotSpot---was a Smalltalk VM that Sun bought. It was an attempt to commercialize some of the work done (also at Sun) on the Self language [1].
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HotSpotVm