I don't really care which bytecode is the "most popular". I just thought it would be cool to introduce people to some specified bytecode running inside subsystems that you probably didn't think anything about before.
Jasper that was a fabulous start to the morning. A morsel of hacker news on hacker news. Thanks.
Would be interested in your thoughts about code generation -
I'm writing a VM, playing with ideas. I have wondered at this as an approach to software development: whenever you have a significant task to do, first build a virtual machine. Then create bytecode to satisfy your application.
You can have a rich instruction set to meet your needs - writing performant or hardware-oriented features in C, but getting easy access to them through your upstream high-level language. Highly portable, no library dependencies.
I'm fine at hand-editing bytecode, but code generation from a high-level language is still a mystery to me. I want to find a notation that gives me enough power to deal with high-level concepts, but for which it is easy to write a compiler to bytecode.
Currently options in mind: scheme (lots of resources, but might be too complicated - can tail recursion be done simply? adequate GC?); forth; some subset of C; something fancy with ometa.
Or, could I just write scheme functions to output machine code, and build my application logic in macros that on top of that. This bypasses the need for a conventional compiler.
I like the idea of scheme functions to output machine code. If you know scheme, you're probably already familiar with this, but since you say code generation is a mystery, let me recommend SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html).
I scratch around at SICP every few months, and generally get stuck because there's a lot of assumption of mathematics knowledge in there that I don't have. But I started to watch the MIT lectures just last weekend. I'll keep at it, sounds like I'm on the right track. Thanks :)
I don't really think it's that important either, and I thought it was an interesting article that described some bytecodes people might not be familiar with, but you had started your article with "What is the most commonly used bytecode language in the world?" and I was responding to that question.
I suspect that it's JVM, due to it's ubiquity in phones, and thought it might be worth pointing out since most people don't know that they have a JVM subset running on their SIM card. We really do have miniature bytecode interpreters running everywhere; and vulnerabilities can lead to security issues that allow your SIM card itself to be rooted[1]
