A Look at the Main JVM Languages Today

Dr. Dobb's, February 14, 2012 The JVM hosts an increasingly wide array of languages. Here we compare the prominent ones, mourn those that have come and gone, and celebrate newborn languages clamoring for attention.
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Fantom

Unique among all the languages presented here, Fantom generates not only Java bytecodes, but .NET intermediate code, and JavaScript. It's a universal language in that respect. It also has some elegant design choices: All integers are 64-bit, thereby removing most overflow issues; all multiprocessing is done with actors only, thereby eliminating a host of other problems; and the libraries have been designed from the get go to support full Unicode characters and strings. In many ways, its design is among the most elegant of the languages in this slideshow. However, it has a unique module design that takes some getting used to and it suffers from a lack of good IDE support.

An explanation of Fantom by the language's author appeared last year in Dr. Dobb's.


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