Kohsuke Kawagachi has posted a blog entry describing how to watch the assembly code
get generated by the JVM during execution, using a non-product (debug or fastdebug)
build of Hotspot and the -XX:+PrintOptoAssembly flag, a trick he says he learned while
at TheServerSide Java Symposium a few weeks ago in Vegas. He goes on to do some analysis
of the generated assembly instructions, offering up some interesting insights into
the JVM's inner workings.

There's only one problem with this: the flag doesn't exist.

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Recently I received a press announcement from Waggener-Edstrom, Microsoft's PR company,
about their latest move in the interoperability space; I reproduce it here in its
entirety for your perusal:

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Not the BitTorrent of some particular movie or game, but the torrent of changes to
the JDK that were held up pending a final blessing on the OpenJDK Mercurial transition.
How do I, a non-Sun employee know this? Because I'm subscribed to the build-dev mailing
list (which seems to be getting the Mercurial changeset notification emails), and
on Wednesday (March 26th), one such email contained 72 new changesets, ranging
from extensions to the query API for JMX 2.0:

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I hate Las Vegas.

I'm here for TheServerSide Java Symposium 2008, which has been held here in Vegas
for the past (umm... three? four? five?) years, and every time I come here I'm reminded
why I really don't like Vegas. It's loud, both in auditory volume and visual noise,
it's boisterous bordering on raunchy, the locals are almost always soured by their
near-constant exposure to tourists, the tourists are... well, they're American tourists
and that says a lot right there, and there's no way to escape it. Ugh.

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Apparently, I'm drawing enough of an audience through this blog that various folks
have started to send me press releases and notifications and requests for... well,
I dunno exactly, but I'm assuming some blogging love of some kind. I'm always a little
leery about that particular subject, because it always has this dangerous potential
to turn the blog into a less-credible marketing device, but people at conferences
have suggested that they really are interested in what I think about various products
and tools, so perhaps it's time to amend my stance on this.

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For those who were skimming my blog looking for the notification that the Lang.NET
2008 Symposium videos were back online, look
no further.

A couple of people have asked me over the last few weeks, so it's probably worth saying
out loud:

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This delicious little tidbit just
crossed my desk, and for those of you too scared to click the link, check this out:

Microsoft will begin collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation to improve native Windows
application development on Java.

Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's open-source software lab, announced at the
EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday that the lab will work
with Eclipse .

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• Original article

Recently, a number of folks in the Java space have taken to openly ridiculing Microsoft's
use of the "Mort" persona, latching on to the idea that Mort is somehow equivalent
to "Visual Basic programmer", which is itself somehow equivalent to "stupid idiot
programmer who doesn't understand what's going on and just clicks through the wizards".
This would be a mischaracterization, one which I think Nikhilik's
definition helps to clear up:

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While tracking some of the links relating to the Groovy/Ruby war, I found this website,
which purportedly tracks job trends based on a whole mess of different job sites.
So, naturally, I had to plug in to get a graph of C#, C++, Java, Ruby, and VB:

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As I've mentioned in passing, one of the things I'm playing with in my spare time
(or will play with, now that I've got everything working, I think) is the LLVM
toolchain. In essence, it looks to be a parallel to Microsoft's Phoenix, except
that it's out, it's been in use in production environments (Apple is a major contributor
to the project and uses it pretty extensively, it seems), and it supports not only
C/C++ and Objective-C, but also Ada and Fortran. It's also a useful back-end for people
writing languages, hence my interest.

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While perusing the E
Tutorial, I noticed something that was simple and powerful all at the same time: URLs
as first-class concepts in the language. Or, if you will, URLs as a factory for
creating objects. Check out this snippet of E:

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Since we're examining various aspects of the canonical O-O language (the three principals
being C++, Java and C#/VB.NET), let's take in a review of another recent post, this
time on the
use of "new" in said languages.

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Gilad makes
the case that static, that staple of C++, C#/VB.NET, and Java, does not belong:

Most imperative languages have some notion of static variable. This is unfortunate,
since static variables have many disadvantages. I have argued against static state
for quite a few years (at least since the dawn of the millennium), and in Newspeak,
I’m finally able to eradicate it entirely.

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• Original article

Just recently, I got this bit in an email from the Redmond
Developer News ezine:

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