Title: The Wall

Dear Francis,

In C Vu 12.3 May 2000 you argue for a hardware-independent machine to which we could write software using a uniform interface. It seems that there have been several attempts at implementing this with respect to a specific programming language. Moreover, of course, the latest, and arguably most successful, attempt has been the Java Virtual Machine.

However, perhaps the main reason for the slow progress in this area has been the unsatisfactory results to date, in terms of hampered performance and the difficulty of implementing an acceptable look and feel for the underlying operating system. Should a Universal Virtual Machine be developed that incorporates programming language independence, no doubt it will suffer from the same problems. The only way around this that I can envisage is for the Universal Virtual Machine's interface to be so superior to the existing platform-dependent ones that it becomes the de facto standard on each hardware platform.

Incidentally, there was a rumour going around about a year ago that Microsoft was working on such a Universal Virtual Machine with the idea of programming language and hardware independence in mind. However, I have seen no further reports on this. If true, perhaps Microsoft is doing this in preparation for the day when Windows is eclipsed and it has to port its applications to another operating system and/or hardware platform as quickly as possible. With a possible Microsoft break-up on the cards that day may come sooner than it wishes.

Kevin McFarlane

I think the balance between computational power and application requirements has changed dramatically of late. Most of what we do today is limited by such things as network and storage speeds. Those of us who are part of the IT industry tend to have little idea as to what causes Joe Public a problem. The fanatical games player wants to hit the metal but 99% of users simply want a system that works, and when a friend tells them about a great program, they want to be able to buy it and use it. It is past time that those aspirations were met. FG.