JVM System Programming Language

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These are Doug's thoughts on a JVM systems programming language (paraphrased and filtered through Nate):

Want a language that serves as "de facto specification" of the JVM. Includes bytecode + intrinsics supported by the major VMs.

Language should have:

• expressions
  • don't want to talk about registers, operand stack
• no implicit conversions
• "tasteful" descriptors (overloading)
  • unclear if these should include checked exceptions
  • should allow all valid JVM identifiers, not just valid Java identifiers
  • Q: how to expose descriptors to a source language like Java?

• macros
  • capability testing (ifdef?) (e.g., does this VM support this unsafe operation?)
  • expand out specialized methods for primitives

• intrinsics (e.g., unsafe)
  • implicit standardization by virtue of a common code base

• no checked exceptions, generics, annotations
  • but these are probably necessary at least in signatures to interact with Java

• an unsafe/intrinsic block

Some use cases:

• Unsafe for subtle shades of volatile not expressible in Java
• Unsafe.throwException (can throw checked exception w/o declaring it)

Other ideas from the crowd (sorry, didn't always catch who said what):

• Java with fewer restrictions (statements nested within expressions, code in constructors before constructor call)
• proof carrying code to show use of Unsafe is indeed safe, have the verifier check it
• build while, etc, as macros? base language something like Grimp (from Soot)?
• tuples, structs