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Java Programming

Java On 8-bit Platforms 160

Posted by Hemos from the very-very-small dept.
ScrotalDwarf writes: " OneEighty software has released the world's first 8-bit Java VM. A fully functional Java VM, kilobytes rather than megabytes, in size! It's aimed at the mobile markets, but being smaller it's a whole lot faster - a fast Solaris JVM implementation!? If that wasn't enough, it's actually based on an implementation of a Turing machine. "
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Java On 8-bit Llatforms More

Java On 8-bit Llatforms

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  • So many mobile devices are at least 32 bit, nevermind 16 or 8. This seems like a wasted effort - an effort that could have gone to better things.

    Speaking of which, do 8 bit machines actually have enough memory and speed to handle Java code? It's not exactly the fastest code in the world...

  • Just don't spill it...

    Seriously, this may not be the most important article on Slashdot, but it is an important advancement. Being able to have Java on your cell phone actually serves some purpose (as opposed to a few other things cell phone makers have come up with). It allows just about anyone to put whatever they want onto their cell phone at little / no cost. The downside: M$ starts making cell phone programs and your phone crashes in the middle of a conversation (it doesn't disconnect, it doesn't drop the signal, it gives you the LCD screen of death).

    OTOH, what's the point behind the Turing machine basis?

    It's all about the Karma Points, baybee...
    Moderators: Read from the bottom up!

  • Isn't any JAVA VM going to necessarily be a turing machine? Someone correct me here if I'm wrong, but isn't a PERL interpreter also a turing machine?

  • java never had the limitations of C/C++ and other languages with bit precision on the int/long/floats. java has arbitrary precision which is processor independant anyway (BigInteger/Decimal can be arbitrary bits) so this is just another VM port. nothing to write home about. sun's embedded java/picojava is equally small (or supposed to be).
  • Finally java comes to my NES and Sega Master System! Now I can .... do nothing more than I previously could.
  • That I can run java on my 286 now? As well as my atari? What about my new portable atari 2600 I just made? I wonder if it supports WAP...
  • Breakthrough Brings Java(TM) Capabilities to Eight-Bit Platforms

    Since when running something on an 8-bit platform a breakthrough?

    I can't believe this, since every single modern, useful chip has at least 16 bit words! Come on, who's going to run Java on an 8051 processor or technological equivalent?

    I once thought the word breakthrough meant an advance into the future...

    Flavio

  • Oh, NO!!! (Score:3)

    by Flavio ( 12072 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @05:01PM (#554111)
    including "intelligent" pens, lighting, telephones and vehicle monitoring devices.

    And PAPER CLIPS!!! NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    How much longer must these demons haunt us?

    Flavio
  • The referenced paper is a little slim on actual technical content. It appears that what they're proposing is in effect an extensible bytecode (what they refer to as "adding new procedures"). This would not in itself be novel---it's one of the guiding principles behind Forth, which is one of the reasons Forth is still used for resource-constrained portable coding. There does seem to be provision for stuffing all those new bytecodes into a single namespace.

    Not surprising, but it will be encouraging if they succeed in getting a fully functional system in a truly small footprint. More power to them. But it'd be nice to see more detail on what their tools are _really_ doing.

    -Jan
  • While the creation of an 8-bit JVM is pretty cool, stay away from the von Neumann/Turing white paper listed on the site. It is the stupidest thing I have ever read. They say that part of their revolutionary new architecture is none other than...a software stack. They also imply that operating systems do not use stacks, but their architecture or "resuable modules" does. Hmmm...last time I looked this was Java. Last time I looked code being executed used stacks to keep track of where they were.
  • The atari 2600 was 4bit wasn't it?
  • Speaking of which, do 8 bit machines actually have enough memory and speed to handle Java code? It's not exactly the fastest code in the world...

    It depends on how it's configured. Until 1992, my main computer was an Apple IIe (definitely an 8-bit box) with 1 meg of RAM and 40 megs of disk...and that wasn't even the most you could put in there. (I also had it running at 10 MHz, so it was pretty damn quick for the time. Used AppleWorks for writing papers and ProTERM for dialing BBSes...fun stuff.)

  • I'm expecting a slew of comments, some from my own friends, ejaculating their opinions of how slow java can be and its worthlessness. HOWEVER, this news is good. While not probably the most difficult project to attempt (but still pretty damn hard), this now allows for application integrity and continuity from site to site.

    The biggest pain in the ass for website developers is the fact that no webpage looks the same on all browsers. Imagine if you could provide a type of core, using JINI or JMI with it, so that the user sees the same java front end no matter what the machine's specs are. Then using JINI/JMI, you could place the difficult, number crunching part of the software on another machine back at your place. And the fact that all of this is write once, run [almost] anywhere just make the whole package deal ooze sexiness.

    Time to dig out those old cheap 8-bit processors and overclock the hell out of them.

  • That I can run java on my 286 now?

    In point of fact, it means you can run java on your pen now (don't ask me why you would want to... manual spell check perhaps?) This is a fascinating fact you could have learned by reading the article [sun.com].

  • I finally post something I deem intelligent for myself and I get hit by a lameass sexbot....

    Why? Why do people post this fucking junk? I don't fucking get it.

  • von Neumann/Turing white paper listed on the site. It is the stupidest thing I have ever read.

    When I was 12 (yes, twelve) my dad got me the complete set of Time/Life books on computers. I admit that to this day (20 years on) I still cast my memory back to those glossy, 4-colour pages when I make an outrageous statement about the "conservative design of CDCs and the original Crays" or the "inherent, uh, complexity I s'pose, of vector processing, uh, chips? architecture?"

    anyhoo, that von-neuman/turing article looks a heck of a lot like a photocopy from that time/life book.

    hm.

  • I would like to apologize for not hitting the "No Score +1 Bonus" button on that previous post. Bad mouse-eye coordination day. Me bad.
  • don't worry I got it...
    It's okay to add some humorous aspect to things you know...

  • really new? (Score:3)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @05:21PM (#554122) Homepage
    Although they claim "full Java capabilities", it's unclear exactly what exactly they've implemented. What of the standard Java class libraries have they implemented? (The white paper on their web site dismisses graphics, for example.)

    The press release also makes some extremely dubious claims about "a novel architectural approach that allows the creation of extremely compact software, often many times smaller than that built using traditional coding techniques." Uh-huh. It's magic!

    The 180sw web site says that this is the first 8-bit Java VM. That's definitely not true -- TinyVM [sourceforge.net] for Lego Mindstorms has been around for quite a long time, and I doubt that's even the first. This "GENEVA" thing may be more complete, but that's a different issue.

    --

  • I never thought I'd fondly remember the "Natalie Portman pours hot grits down my penis bird's pants" days...

  • Re:Breakthrough? (Score:4)

    by willy_me ( 212994 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @05:30PM (#554124)
    I can't believe this, since every single modern, useful chip has at least 16 bit words!

    Two reasons why we still have, and probably always will have 8 bit chips:

    Cost : 8 bit chips are cheaper to make.
    Power Consumption : 8 bit chips use less power.

    I can see no reason why a simple, non-scientific calculator would ever want to use a 16 bit chip. It would cost more to make and require a larger solar panel. What's the point? There are more 8 bit chips out in the marketplace then any other type of chip and this isn't going to change any time soon. Eight bits is hardly useless.

    Willy

  • "Turing" (Score:3)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @05:34PM (#554125) Homepage
    Oh my. To answer myself a bit about the "magic" part: I just read the white paper on "Turing machines". It seems that the people there read a (non-technical) biography of Turing and thought it was really cool. They seem to totally miss the concept that modern computer hardware essentially implements a universal Turing machine, and have instead decided that the ideal thing to do is re-implement an emulated universal Turing machine in software. I don't think I need to go on any more about how silly that is....

    Okay maybe a little bit: have you ever designed a Turing machine from scratch to do something as simple as multiply two numbers? It's incredibly tedious. There's a reason we invented more complicated instruction sets, and then higher-level languages.

    --

  • According to what I've read, I think the 2600 was an 8-bit system. It had a Motorola 6507 CPU, which was a modified 6502. The 6502 was an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address bus. The 6507 was the exact same processor with two modifications -- a 13-bit address bus and it had no interrupt lines.

    J

  • I'm assuming that their product is just a new instuction set bytecode that contains 1 instruction procedure calls or something like that, coupled with a design philosophy of using tons more procedures and giving the procedure set a smoother complexity gradient (and software to optimize towards this goal automagically). Sounds kind of cool to me.

    But, they really need to fire their tech-writing staff and get a new one. (What the heck is an "MPEG-3" decoder? Does someone not know that MP3 Audio is in MPEG-1?)

  • Hehe, I was going to post this, but you beat me to the punch.

    Although you have skipped several systems... Game Gear and Game Boy being the most noticable, though it's my understanding that the Game Gear was really nothing more than a Master System in a smaller package--hence most SMS emulators also capable of running Game Gear ROMS. I'm pretty sure that Game Boy is fairly different from the NES, though.

    Also, what about those great TI calcs [ticalc.org]? Aren't they 8-bit? IIRC, the ones that are graphing but not the 89, 92, or 92+ are running on a Z80. Considering everything that those wonderful machines have had coded for them (my 86 has Zelda, Lemmings, Mario, Tetris, and various other things on it right now), it would just be a matter of time until we could be running all of those wonderful java games during math class.

    Yes, I'm joking, obviously... but if someone were to do this, you can bet that I'd be one of the first to check it out and fiddle with it. It'd be YAIODIBYC - Yet Another Instance Of Doing It Because You Can.

    --Psi

    Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.

  • The referenced whitepaper is kind of a POS. They claim that with 26 kilobytes of operating system, it's possible to implement any solution. That's fine, but where are the drivers for the video card going to come from? Where is the sound going to come from? Where will the drivers for my funky backup drive reside? They will all have to be tacked on to those 26 kilobytes of memory allocation and printing to the screen, and the result is going to be a system just as large as anything else out there, once you add all the actually useful stuff. Besides, Java is only useful when it has some windowing libraries and the like, those still need to be built for each cel phone or whatever device that the stuff will go on. I don't think that something can really be touted as a Java implementation unless a large majority of the libs (javax.swing.*, etc) also exist. If you can't run StarOffice on your cel phone, what good is it?
  • I'm not sure exactly what they're claiming but the TINI board [ibutton.com] has run java on an 8 bit processor for some time.
  • I think the breakthrough is that new doors have opened. Maybe people who previously wouldn't have been able to write code for embedded systems now can.

    Don't underestimate the usefulness of an old 80-something. What do you think is operating in, say your microwave? A 386? Or in any little old object that you use without thinking. Hey, the graphing calculators that you see so often in highschool and college don't run on superfast processors. In fact, the TI85 that I have runs on a Z80 from Zilog [zilog.com] (actually, some ran on Z80 clones) which, I believe is just an 8080, though I'm likely wrong.

    Besides, not everyone has to or wants to sit around on the latest tech. Using old technology to it's maximum is, IMO, much more impressive than pulling billions of triangles out of today's machines. No, I tell a lie, they are both very cool. Using anything to it's full potential (and beyond) is very cool (IMO).

  • ...when the revolution comes.

    Before long, the paper clips will take on the task of organizing all of those toasters running Linux into a formidable army. I'd bet that they take on the people who eat Pop-Tarts and bagels cold first... it's people like that that are driving toasters to oblivion.

    Viva la revolucion!

    --Psi

    Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.

  • Turing completeness is not a lofty goal for an instruction/programming system. You'll find Turing completeness in the strangest places - theoretically I can produce any computable result with TeX macros.
  • deeta
    .oO0Oo.
  • Another contender for "first 8-bit Java VM" is Dallas Semiconductor's collection of embedded Java devices at www.ibutton.com [ibutton.com].

    There's some neat stuff, like the "tini" board - a small (68-pin SIMM form-factor) embedded computer with 10BaseT ethernet and TCP/IP networking. It can run a web server, as well as Telnet and FTP. It also has a couple of serial ports for interfacing to other components.

  • When will I see Java on a Commodore 64? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Commodore 64 is a perfect Internet and Java appliance. With custom chipset, high-res graphics, excellent audio and 64K of RAM, it can run many applications from games to graphical desktops (GEOS) that rivals the Macintosh. The C=64 has proven itself to the world since the 1980s and is still the most popular computer in the world (by the number of units sold, in terms of single computer models).

    Maybe it is time for the C=64 to be made again, with a customized Java virtual machine, to serve as the basis from Internet terminals to PDAs?

  • almost certainly a hoax (Score:3)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @06:05PM (#554137) Homepage Journal
    They may have pulled the wool over some investor's eyes, but their white paper does not describe any new technology whatsoever. If they are to be believed, they've invented the revolutionary new technique of subroutines.

    In general, it takes more bits of memory to implement a function on a Universal Turing Machine than on a conventional microprocessor. The point of the UTM wasn't that it was efficient, it was that it was a very simply machine that could compute anything that is computable. But not necessarily very quickly.

    I hope the managers of the funds my 401k is invested in don't invest in companies like this; do they have experts to evaluate high-tech startups?

  • ...I can finally get Java running on my NES?

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @06:10PM (#554139)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This isn't designed for desktops or servers, it's for cell phones. You don't need a video card, printer, or tape backup drivers for those. Windowing libraries for a cell phone is just plain scrary...
  • Because they are facing backwards, 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
  • Wrong. Turing machines are merely a very simple form of machine that has been proven to be theoretically as powerful in terms of what it can compute as the most powerful machines we have. But there are less powerful ones.
  • Why is this off topic? THe moderating system doesn't work at all.
  • Lately it seems like people complain about how impractical certain achievements posted on Slashdot are. I was under the impression that in the eyes of fellow geeks, hacks stand on their own merit - being judged on how clever they are and nothing else. When did all this concern about how useful or practical an accomplishment is factor into the equation about whether it deserves recognition? (ex. a Slashdot article). Java on 8 bit machines is an extremely cool hack - inter-geek approval where it is merrited - if they want to try and make a living off this hack, that's their business (and their investors' I suppose).

  • All digital computers are Turing machines! (Score:3)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @06:35PM (#554145) Homepage
    The Church-Turing Thesis is the preposition that any discrete function can be solved by symbolic manipulation. A Turing Machine is defined as a device which can solve a computable function by means of symbolic manipulation (like 1s and 0s, for example). (A Universal Turing Machine is a machine that can emulate any Turing Machine, and can therefore solve any discrete function.)

    Basically, this means every computer that operates by rules of logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc, as opposed to chaotic or fuzzy systems) is a Turing Machine. Your desktop PC, your Nokia, your calculator watch, your Chinese water clock, are all examples of Turing Machines.

    Personally, I'd be far more amazed by a JVM that was implemented by a device that was not a Turing Machine.

    Kevin Fox
  • Java runs slow enough on 16 and 32 bit. I know there is fuctionality here, but how much can you can when you slow it down. Besides, shouldn't they be focusing on the soon to be released 64-bit platforms. I know intel is working hard on this and AMD is right behind.
  • Offtopic!!! Wtf! It was a joke! the current temperature in hell As in Hell just froze over, you ignorant fucks!
  • Z80 just an 8080, noooo
    The Z80 was backwards compatable with the 8080 but added lots of new toys like indexed addressing inprovements interrupt handling, automatic refreshing of DRAM, a 16-bit I/O address space (8080 had the 256 line I/O space seperate from the normal 16-bit memory), memory block copy post increment and repeat in a single instuction. A spare set of registers for fast context switching. Bit set, reset and test.

    I wonder this new VM would fit on a ZX spectrum, the £100 Z80 computer from the 1980s?

  • Why do they say road works when it doesn't?

    What?

  • Absolutely right. And moreover look at the very first sentence of the paper:
    OneEighty Software Ltd announced a major technological breakthrough which will, for the first time ever, extend full Java capabilities to eight-bit processors using ultra-compact coding.

    I almost laught my head off. Java, eight-bits, turing machine, ultra-compact... mwaheaheahea!! Is it just me or all these words cannot fit in the same text??
    If all this is a true story, I guess they meant "stripped down version supporting primitive features" instead of "ultra-compact Java implementation based on turing machines"
    Haha ;-)


    --
  • FWIW, if you've implemented Java on it, it's at least a Turing machine, but no less. It could be a superset, but no superset has been shown to exist (which isn't to say that it doesn't).

    Proof left as an exercise to the reader. (Hint: Java is itself Turing complete, which implies...)

  • It's based on Forth (Score:4)

    by dmoen ( 88623 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @07:41PM (#554152) Homepage
    I've seen Bernard Hodson's stuff on the net before. He has a Forth interpreter and a library of subroutines that occupies less than 32K, and he has been making grandious claims about his software for years. The last time around, he was claiming that his software constituted a revolutionary new "gene based" approach to programming (he calls Forth subroutines "genes"), and, just like this time around, he was making a big deal about his Forth system being equivalent to a Turing machine

    I guess he had problems convincing people to program in Forth, because now he has a Java front end.

  • What kind of silly joke is this? (Score:3)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @07:43PM (#554153)
    According to their whitepaper, they have made a Universal Turing Machine in software, running on conventional microprocessors. They are then writing (what?) Turing machine programs for this Turing machine instead of writing normal assembly or C code. This can't be true. Anyone who has ever taken a course on Turing machines know that they are very impractical devices. Any non-trivial program (such as multiplication of two numbers) will take an inordinate amount of time, and if you want to use your multiplication routine in more than one place in your program, then you have to copy it verbatim. This usually leads to a combinatorial explotion in the size of Turing-machine programs. And that is certainly not a way of saving space.

    Furthermore, Turing machines are extremely unpractical computing devices. They are not allowed to have any kind of I/O during computation. All input must reside on the tape at input, and any output must be written to tape before termination. I think such a view of computing would be one of the most useless things ever to use in embedded computing where side-effects is usually all that matters.

    Now, there are ways around these limitation, such as using more than one tape which can often reduce a Turing machine design dramatically. But these reductions are usually only conceptually. If you take the time to write up all the state-transitions and so on in one large table as you eventually will have to, if you are to implement it in software, it doesn't really matter. There is also the concept of an Oracle Turing Machine, where you could have special states, and if the machine decided to enter one of those states, magic would happen, and the tape would suddenly be changed in accordance with the procedure associated with that state (e.g, a special state for multiplication of two 32-bit numbers). It could also be used as a way to fake polling I/O. But it still would be nowhere as convenient or practical as just doing normal assembly programming.

    I'm not sure what they are trying to get us to believe here. Ok, they've made a small Java VM (only 5 times bigger than TinyVM [sourceforge.net]). They do, however also claim to have revolutionized computing by reinventing the Turing Machine. Given the lack of technical details on exactly what this means, it's impossible to know whether it is correct. But, considering the alternative of a hoax, marketing madness, or some other unknown reason for them to mislead us, I find it hard to believe that it can be true.

  • Thank you for clearing this up!
  • Good grief! That means that you could implement this in my favorite language Brainfuck. []!
  • If you use their "secret" language, I bet it would be somewhere between assembler and C programmer.

    Not even. Writing functions for a basic universal turing machine, which is what they seem to imply, would be extremely tedious -- way more so than writing in ASM (or even x86 machine code).

    --

  • There are already _millions_ of 8-bit java VMs (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16, 2000 @08:04PM (#554157)
    The JavaCard standard defines a very small java that can run on tiny platforms. There are already millions (literally) of card-JVMs already shipping.

    If you have an AMEX "Blue" card, then you have a JVM in your pocket (I believe its an Hitachi H8, but one of the tiny 8 bit versions).

    About half of all smartcards made right now (including almost all from European giant GemPlus) run JVMs.

    Anyone who went to Sun's JavaOne show a couple of years ago was handed a rather chunky ring, which had a Dallas Semiconductor iButton on it - this too has a JVM (I actually wrote some code for mine - using the same toolchain as for regular desktop java). I believe it is an 8051 microcontroller.

    I just received a TINI board from Dallas, which is the same as the iButton, but in a DIMM form-factor. It's sooooo cool. Info about it is here [ibutton.com]

    Maybe someone should code a 4-bit JVM, so we can run it on Voyager 2 (which has two 4-bit processors) - how's that for mobile code!

  • Clearly you have not thought through the implications of a beowulf cluster of these things!!
  • Actually a Turing machine can do things that no real computer ever will, because it has infinite memory. A Turing machine is a mathematical idealization. It makes the math simpler if you assume an infinite memory. People use Turing machines for discussing stuff like whether a given problem is solvable in polynomial time, or proving things like the theorem that no Turing machine program can ever determine whether a given Turing machine program will go into an endless loop.

    I'm not an expert, but I believe there are also real-world computers (at least theoretical ones) that are more powerful than a Turing machine, e.g. quantum computers.

  • Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.
    It's turning into a damn police state, Sam!

    Heh, that's the greatest comic ever, still makes me laugh.

    -Dan the drunk
  • About the only novel thing mentioned in whitepaper mentioned was a means of dynamically adding to the system libraries (though even this isn't very original). Other than that everything they mentioned was simply standard design practive made to sound innovative. ("recursive functions" and "software procedures" are new ideas?!? - their quotes btw) Add to this the fact that their website has nothing but investor info and this starts looking really dubious.

  • Steaming load of BS (Score:3)

    by SimHacker ( 180785 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @09:31PM (#554162) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone else see a big steaming load of BS, designed to bilk investors? The white paper was ridiculously trivial, devoid of real content, yet demeaningly explaining the most basic computer science 101 concepts as if the real innovations they weren't revealing were far to complex for anyone in the industry to grasp. And then we have straw man questions and answers in the FAQ like:
    "Isn't ORIGIN a proprietary technology, like Windows?

    The internal procedures are proprietary and need to remain so in order to ensure the efficiency of the software."

    Oh yeah, their software runs faster if nobody knows how it works or is allowed to observe it. Sounds like some kind of quantum computer, huh? More like an investor scam.

    Looks to me like the old codger in charge is trying to exploit the good name of Alan Turing, his former co-worker. So where was he when Mr. Turing was on trial and needed a character witness to testify about his outstanding contributions to computer science and the defeat of Adolf Hitler?

    (It's so rare I get the chance to use a legitimate ad swasticum attack.)

    "Could ORIGIN be used to program sophisticated computer games?

    There is no reason why not. In theory it can handle any application. There is nothing specific to games programming that it would find problematic."

    After that pedantic lecture on Turing machines, this vaguely reassuring "theoretical" answer does not impress me. The lack of speed may not seem "problematic" to an academic who doesn't know anything specific about game programming. But how about answering a more specific question: "For the practical programming of even simple computer games, is ORIGIN any better than Java, which totally sucks ass?"

    -Don

  • Uh, Java is absolutely no different from C/C++ in this regard. Java's ints will always [sun.com] be 32 bits, its longs will always be 64 bits.

    BigInteger has nothing to do with the Java language. It's just a regular old class written in Java that stores its magnitude as a big-endian array of those 32 bit ints. If it didn't already exist in the API you could write it yourself. If you download the API source and used BitInteger as a reference, you could probably write the same thing in C/C++ in under an hour. Or you could use one of the many existing aribitrary precision C math libraries in the world.

  • Okay, so it's an 8-bit Turing complete machine. Many text editors, such as VI are complete [davesource.com] but you ain't gonna see me playing Quake on them...

    Yeah, it's nice for Java, after all, the more machines a VM can run on, the better for it. Unfortunately, the white paper reads more like marketing spiel rather than anything else.

    If he had a point to make at all, it's that too many programmers don't write code with a view to reusability in mind. Now that is something worth reminding us...


    Amazed at how many posts have been moderated 0 in this topic...

    "A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
  • I tried to dig out more info on the ORIGIN technology they cite as the underpinning of their JVM. I didn't find much, but I did find this piece, "The Next Big Thing [180sw.com]". I'd be interested to hear comments on the claims therein.

    So what if the folks at one80 have a flawed understanding of a turing machine. So what if one80 is using FORTH to get it done. Their claim is that they have a full 1.2 compliant, not just personal java, implementation that is tiny. Pretty cool.

  • Yes, the white paper was definitely written by somebody who just barely grasped the concept of Turing Machines, and didn't realize (or believe the implication) that the fantastic computational abilities he claimed was unique to their system was actually widely applicable to ALL modern computers.

    Funny how they have the nerve in the faq to pose themselves straw man questions like "Can it interoperate with system XYZ?" and answer "Of course, since our system is Turing complete!". Well FYI systems XYZ and ABC and 123 and A to Z are all Turing Complete -- It's No Big Deal, and they're making a worthless and facitious statement, like "oh, that's just a simple matter of programming". At least Spinal Tap had enough self delusional integrity to claim something UNIQUE: that their amplifier "went to eleven".

    Next thing we know they'll be suing every computer company on Earth for violating their "Turing Machine" patent.

    -Don

  • i think you should clean out your crackpipe.

  • err i just thought of a way to find out the way to travel faster than light. it's completely impractical but in theory it would work. does that make me really clever? not really. damn.
  • Does this mean that java is closer to being used for small embeded systems? Like I thought it was designed for?
    I am suprised that this hasn't happened yet! Who knows ... maybe we can now have several small 8 bit chips be the java interpreters. I imagine we could fit a ton of these on a pci card and do massive parallel stuff, or... we could use the proc in the box and run much much faster.
    I guess I see the worth of the project, but I doubt that it will be usefull for more than just an * marked next to the platforms that java can run on.

    Or maybe all of this is the White Castle talking...
  • Wow maybe they can "backport" this to my 32 bit machine, so I can finally run java faster than paint drys....
  • Dear One80 Publicity Department:

    I respectfully submit these slogans for use in your advertising campaign:

    "Special instruction that sets P = NP in 1 clockcycle!"

    "Now, with Patented Order(1 Click) [TM]-Complete (R)-Rated (C)-Plus-Plus E-Commerce Algorithms."

    "Offering the world's first fully optimized totally integrated long term zeroth order solution to the halting problem!"

    "Write once, halt anywhere."

    "We believe our own hype." Oops -- I sold all rights to that one to Sun, so you'll have to negotiate a license for that slogan with Sun directly. There's a special discount for Java VM licensees.

    -Don

  • There is this fascinating language called
    unlambda. It's minimalistic, Turing complete
    and compilable. If you are not convinced by
    the above poster and want an example of why
    Turing machines are hideous, try coding a
    calculator in unlambda.
  • There is not a single digital computer in existence that is as computationally powerful as a turing machine. That's because all real digital computers are Deterministic Finite State Automata (D-FSA). A Turing Machine (TM) has an infinite tape, and it is this infinite storage capacity that allows it to compute things that no computer with a finite amount of storage can compute. An FSA (of both the deterministic and non-deterministic variety) can only *approximate* a TM, by using its finite storage to emulate an infinite tape for practical-sized problems.
  • Although the white paper cites FORTH, it fails to demonstrate any substantative difference between its architecture and that of FORTH. Granted, my knowledge of FORTH is a little hazy, but this seems awfully similar (in fact, interpretive Java VM's are stack machines as well.)

    My understanding of how FORTH works is that each opcode is a reference to a subroutine. All subroutines implicitly read their input off the stack and leave their output on the stack. I think even conditional execution is handled in this way. There is no real difference between system routines and "user" routines, and traps to the underlying architecture are just a specific instruction that takes the jump address off the stack.

    FORTH code could be extremely compact, because the source and destination of operands and results were implicit and did not have to be coded in the instruction. A FORTH interpreter could also be very compact because the underlying architecture is very simple. A friend of mine once (late '70s) implemented a data logger in 2K of ROM by writing a FORTH interpreter that took about 30 bytes and implementing the rest in FORTH. This was done on a COSMAC (used an 1802 processor - the machine with the SEX instruction).

    Java VM's (I think) are a stack machine also, and java bytecode is quite compact for much the same reason FORTH is. Users of swing may not believe this but that's a different rant ;-}.

    Turing machines had random access storage in the form of a conceptual tape that the machine could seek back and forwards along. Hodson's white paper talks about stacks (as used in FORTH and various non turing-complete automata) but appears to refer to his VM as using a stack. I can't really see much difference between this and FORTH. Perhaps I am exhibiting high specific gravity but the parallels between this VM and a turing machine seem pretty strained. He doesn't really talk about the "stack" on this machine being random access, and I can't really see how this would help beyond the mark, dup, roll etc. operators that FORTH VM's have anyway. (Note to self - Can't actually remember if FORTH does marks on the stack; I might be confusing it with Postscript)

    To save me having to trot down the road to Borders and buy the java VM spec, could someone who understands the architectures of Java and FORTH say something cogent on the differences?
  • I got the impression Turing machine WAS their
    innovation. The sad thing is, I am sure he would
    have no trouble patenting it.
  • Quantum computers, though they (will) have some wacky, wacky capabilities, in a sense don't have any more abilities than a standard Turing machine. Why? Becuase, as I understand things, quantum computers have a strict subset of the capabilities of what's called a non-deterministic Turing machine (to a first approximation, a Turing machine that can fork itself every time it needs to make a decision). Now, the really interesting thing about NDTM's is that everything you can do on one can also be done on your bog-standard deterministic Turing machine (by putting each fork call on a queue and executing one step of the "virtual turing machine" at a time). Now, this is a slow process (and some things that are currently computationally infeasible become tractable if a real analogue to a NDTM became available), but the point is if you ignore time, NDTM's don't give you any more abilities.

    Roger Penrose is perhaps the latest of a long line of individuals who have argued the brain has powers beyond a Turing Machine. Despite his claims, the jury is definitely still out on this.

  • Java's Slowness (Score:3)

    by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @10:44PM (#554177) Homepage Journal
    From the article: but being smaller it's a whole lot faster - a fast Solaris JVM implementation!?

    The Java byte code really isn't all that slow. In fact, making the VM smaller would actually probably make it slower since you'd be leaving out things like a JIT or any sort of optimization. Generally speaking, there is a compromize between speed and size - large usually is faster (optimized for speed), smaller usually is slower (optimized for size).

    The JVM itself is a nice speedy little thing. It's not slow. It's the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) that's slow! Since almost all Java apps require some form of GUI interaction, and the AWT is the means of graphical interaction, the AWT becomes a signifigant bottleneck. If Sun spent some time on speeding up the AWT, all those pretty graphical Java apps would receive a nice speed boost.

    Even with the JIT turned off, Java bytecode alone usually runs at a decent clip. Unfortunately for Java applications, the AWT is very slow - it actually became slower in JDK1.2 and is picking up some speed in JDK1.3 (it hasn't regained it's JDK1.1 speed though).

    If anyone wants to read a more indepth benchmark comparing x86 C with Java code, try here [javalobby.org].

  • The simplest approach to representing numbers with a Turing machine is in unary -- the number of sequential "1" marks on the tape is the value of the number, with a "0" to mark the end. (Like null terminated strings, but strlen() returns the value!)

    You can also store data in the state of the machine, instead of writing it on the tape. Turing machines don't have registers, nor stacks, nor random access memory, but they can be in any number of different states. So to do anything non-trivial, you end up with a heck of a lot of machine states, connected together in a complex network. In order to copy a number, you have to suck up some of that number into the machine state "temporary storage", then go into a state that moves the read/write head to the destination while remembering the temporary state, and then go through a series of states that writes the machine state out onto the tape while moving the head. So you could write a program that copied a number one bit at a time by moving back and forth between source and destination, using relatively few machine states. Or a program that copied numbers more efficiently n bits at a time with 2^n and then some machine states. To do anything non-trivial, you end up with zillions of machine states, representing a network of all possible values of temporary storage connected by tape seeking and writing instructions, and you also require infinite amounts of tape to execute the program.

    Think of it like an Adventure (MUD) game with one deterministic player, who is carrying a tape and read/write head. The state of the machine is which room you're in, plus the state of the tape and position of the head. Each room has a door labeled for each possible token on the tape, and when you walk through correct door, it can write a token on the tape, and move the head up or down. A program is a set of interconnected rooms. You have to double the number of rooms (states) to represent one bit of information in the machine state, like the Star Trek episode when they were beamed aboard an exact duplicate of the Enterprise, that represented one bit (the answer to the question "Is this real?").

    It's hard for me to believe that they're using a Turing machine model for efficiency's sake.

    -Don

  • 99% of the time mutual funds invest in only stock and sometimes bonds. feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.

  • Silly joke? A scam? Or is there something to this? I dunno, but doing a little web-searching on "Bernard Hobson" (which subsequently leads to GENETIX, Bloor Research, SoftwareReview.com, www.turing.org.uk, and King's College London, and more) shows that this guy has been around for quite a while, and apparently have been working with the theoretical foundations of this Turing-based-JVM for quite some time... Of course, I researched everything on the web... And, since I read from several different websites, it must be true, right?

    Owww... My head hurts...

  • A few years ago, I heard that C-64s were still in production for sale in either Mexico or China, where PCs were too expensive for the general public. Not sure whether that's the case now, with the abundancy of cheap Pentioid PCs.

  • Some details from the FAQ (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @11:44PM (#554183)
    After reading all the white papers, I was able to draw out some facts:

    VM is supposedly 70k, supports multi-threading and GC. No graphics capability however. I wonder how big the Palm KVM is at? It includes a small implementation with graphics.

    Compatible with Java 1.3 as far as class file format goes. Supposedly runs can interpret any Java bytecode.

    The VM itself is called Geneva, and runs on an engine/system/framework called Origin.

    Origin itself is composed of small building blocks with a "high dehree of reuse". An interesting twist is that while of course they wish the internal blocks (procedures) to be closed, they encourage outside blocks to be developed and will pay royalties to the developer of these outside blocks if they are incorperated into the core.

    Right now, it appears to work on x86 chips and Sparc chips - the Origin system itself must be ported to other platforms, and then Genevia will run on top of it.

    Origin itself has some sort of primitive internal database/file system, and they talk of perhaps working with DB companies to improve on that.

    You can write directly in Origin if you like, but there is no kind of IDE or the like - they encourage use of the Genevia Java VM as an easy path to using Origin.

    It sounds kind of interesting. What they need to do now is release it for the Palm.
  • Sorry. You've got Turing Machines and Universal Turing Machines confused. Any device that can complete even a single function via symbolic manipulation is by definition a Turing Machine. A device that can complete any computable function is a Universal Turing Machine.

    Kevin Fox
  • It has been a few decades since we have had to think seriously about making things small. It is a fine, albeit a lost, art. News flash: you make code small with embedded interpreters. Threaded code, microcode, internal data bases and so forth are the meat and marrow of coding tiny. An extensible VM or bytecode interpreter as a vehicle for making code small isn't news either -- that was the fundamental operation of threated interpretive languages such as Forth. These are great, difficult and fun things to do. But, alas, nobody has really much use for this sort of thing anymore. Every now and then, we need this kind of thing again. But coding for 8-bit machines? Why?
  • >Being able to have Java on your cell phone
    >actually serves some purpose (as opposed to a
    >few other things cell phone makers have come up
    >with).

    With release like this you can run java on cellphone ? Really ? I thought this has allready be done, atleast in nokia's cellphones. Or what do you think about first nokia waphones (7110) writing "strange" java.net exceptions to its screen in some error situations ? Sounds pretty obvious that Nokia is running java allready even it seems to be out of users reach.

    Did some search on this topic and Motorola is releasing new cellphones next month that allow users to write java for them. Check out this [wirelessdevnet.com] url for more info. Would be nice but im getting that new communicator when its out ;)
    --

  • OK, 8-bit processor instructions are 8-bit, and 32-bit instructions are 32-bit. Moreover, memory pointers on 8-bit systems are normally 16-bit (relative and zero-page pointers are 8-bit), and on 32-bit systems they are, well, 32-bit (rel. and 0-page 16-bit). With 1-byte alignment, data structures are as big on 8-bit systems as they are on 32-bit systems.

    So the VM might indeed be shrunk a lot, say it may become a little more than 1/4 of its original size if you put it on an 8-bit system. This would be a nice rate for any "embedded" program.

    Alas, the VM is not the program. It simply is the VM. The program is written in "run once, compile everywhere" code[*], so this code has the same size no matter where you put it.

    And I recall the class libraries are something like 20 Mb of code. And while an embedded program might just not require, for instance, Swing, it is part of standard Java AFAIK. What I am trying to say is that programs expect the standard class library to be there, so it'll cost you 20 Mb of space anyway. To set up 20 Mb of space on an 8-bit machine, you would cross some 64k boundaries ;-)

    One solution might be to get rid of the class libraries, and write the code yourself, or "statically link" the code. This makes your program bigger...

    You might argue that e.g. a wrist watch wouldn't need class libraries (e.g. Swing ;-) for its simple tasks. Then again, this makes me wonder why a wrist watch needs Java; it doesn't really benefit from "run once, compile everywhere" code[*], the only thing that really matters to such a watch is how it communicates with the outside world. Well, maybe system updates... I don't know. I just don't yet see the use of my fridge talking in a 4gl. He can just use compiled-to-machinecode programs as far as I'm concerned. Then, if it's an 8-bit processor, the program itself will be about 1/4th of a 32-bit program, and the VM will be 0 bytes.

    While I'm talking about this, does anyone know how many bits a single Java instruction is?

    [*] OK, I wanted to write "compile once, run anywhere", but this appeared instead. Given that much Java VM's are Jitter-based (compile to machinecode on the fly), I actually think that this typo isn't that goofy ;-)

    It's... It's...
  • When I saw the Dallas 8051-based 8-bit Java about 4 months ago, I was pretty amazed, though I haven't actually done any coding with it. The 8051 is a pretty slow chip, and I program it with assembly [pjrc.com]. I believe their 8-bit Java runs on a souped-up greatly enhanced 8051 variant, but still an 8-bit microcontroller.

    I just read the press release, and it looks like Hemos added the "world's first" part, which this certainly is not, since the Dallas TINI has been on the market for a while now.

  • When I first heard about embedded java I put it right with WinCE in the "Why?!" catagories. I believe that java is a pretty good RAD language and it is nice to have a web enabled platform independent gui standard. These are its strengths and they are great for web programs where bandwidth is often the limiting factor, not code spead and control. Put more in the VM and make the code that is moved about smaller. Let someone write to one gui standard.
    In the world of gigabit NICs and FibreChannel RAID controllers running on InfiniBand, java just doesn't fit. Sure you can take a chainsaw to it and cut out what you don't need. This isn't java anymore though. If it doesn't run all the sun APIs, it isn't java. Now if sun starts bending on that for publicity and cash ("How much does a java logo cost?") than they look real hipocritical considering their battle with MS.
    Even with a chainsawed java, it still doesn't make sense. Java has no stack structures except for primitives. It gives the author little control of memory deallocation. This is a big issue when you have limited amounts RAM and no swap. Also, having "secret" threads running around freeing memory while the author needs code to run at a specific rate really hurts. Graphics? What does an anti-lock breaking system need with graphics code?
    I suspect there is reason that most embedded/realtime OSs are written in C/assembly and have those types of APIs. Even C++ is feared due to sense of lack of control. The STL is never used without source control of it. At these levels programmers are pulled back to the days when size and speed really mattered. Java can't give you that. A JVM takes up too much space in software and java chips are often too big, require too much power or are too expensive or all of the above. I suspect that JVMs in an embedded environment would find it hard to achieve C/assembly speeds. In the gui feature rich world it doesn't matter that much. In the world were the two major features are send and receive, size and speed are king.
  • And there are other less known products out there, for example http://www.jakom.de [jakom.de]. You can even download it to evaluate,- e.g. this is a _real_ (8 bit) product.

    Some people just make good products, others produce the noise... Slashdot should be about the first group, not the second...

    Breace
  • Again, Turing Machines aren't simulations. A pocket calculator is a real, honest-to-whatever, Turing Machine. No simulation about it. It can solve a problem via symbolic manipulation. Bam: Turing Machine.

    Universal Turing Machines are simulations, because of the infinite tape (and time) needed.

    Kevin Fox
  • Where do you get the idea that Java is a RAD language? It's as fucking rapid as C++ development (for the intelligent reader's knowlege you CAN use a decent IDE to create an interface and then just write in some cheap and easy methods to the widgets and make a weenie app, I know this but don't consider it because it isn't often done, well at least by me). Java is all about fitting the code to the application. If you only need x number of functions then you only need to include x number of functions in your JVM or hardware decoder. If you've got a limited expansion device (i.e. PDA) you can make the OS just a JVM and have people write Java apps for it. Unless you REALLY need to you always load class libraries dynamically so they can be stored on the machine with the runtime rather than toted along with your app code. Besides Java being designed specifically for low resource applications (i.e. smart toasters) it's also super portable. You compile it one time and it runs on a bunch of different ISAs and operating systems. Ever write a Win CE app? You have to compile it for all the different processors Win CE devices run on. Your comment about graphics just proves you're a jackball who's never written an iota of Java code. Java apps do NOT require any graphical elements what so ever. (char)System.in.read works pretty well as a command line interface. So does adding argument handling to main(). If you want to go hardecore you can use EJBs to communicate at a binary input level. Java chips are contrary to your belief pretty cheap and run bytecode pretty damn fast. Java chips unlike general purpose CPUs only need to include the functional units that the JVM is going to use, like a super RISC chip that knows beforehand all the operations it will need so has them all in hardware. If you "chainsaw" things out, using only required libraries or a limited JVM, you've still got Java. It was designed from the beginning to do this.
  • You already can build a native Java chip. You just build your hardware to do what the JVM specs say a JVM needs to do and you're set. Using the Transmeta code morphing shit is just going to slowdown the process. Running a JVM on a chip with code morphing is running bytecode in a virtual machine inside of a software emulated ISA. Your best bet for using Transmeta chips would be to compile the JVM into the VLIW format and just run it natively on the TM chip. Code morphing is just a trick they came up with to let x86 run on their processor without their processor actually being an x86.
  • No, actually programs do NOT expect the class libraries to be there. In Java you load your class libraries statically and only need to load what you need. If you want the entire Math package you import it all, if you only need PI you only import PI. You don't need to include all the libraries with the JVM or you can make some of your own specifically for your system and load them up.
  • If you want to speed up your Java apps a lot, multithread the fucking things. AWT is kinda slow if you've only got a single thread running but if you stick different elements of the GUI into different threads and then process intensive methods in other threads you're going to get an apparent speed increase. If you've got a single thread running you need to wait for it to finish in order to do anything else. The same logic goes for C++ apps, if you don't manage your interface and processing you're going to end up with programs that freeze up until they are done with their processing. Be seems to have learned this well so everything in their OS is multithreaded, you can run dozens of high processor demand apps with no problem and little to know apparent slowdown of the machine.
  • I have written in java before actually. I wrote both applets and stand alone programs for stock option and bond calculations. I did find java to be a fast way to get a gui application on to many platforms. I found it horrible for the math side of what I did with many VMs. Of course you can write command line applications with java. I do not deny that. I have seen java forced into so many environments from applets to servlets. It can do all of these things but only a few of them very well.
    I agree with you that java and java chips may be a good fit for PDAs and settop boxes but I work more in the I/O controller space. I also thought that Sun's licensing was pretty strict about partial java implementations being official java. I always thought it odd that so much the java api was considered mandatory parts of the language rather than optional extra libraries. If an official java can exclude the extras they do not need, that I stand corrected about the vm size. If the chips can stand up to the current crop of I/O processors, you have got me there. But I doubt it because...
    Speed and low level control are still very important for I/O controllers and real time applications. The language hides things that most low level developers need or want. For example, they want total control of memory allocation and deallocation. They want direct access to memory. Java just doesn't have this. So even with a fast, inexpesive chip running java native, you still have the lack of control. Heck, for a certain routines, assembly comes into play in this space.
  • C wasn't designed for game programming back in the day. It could be fairly slow and you ran into problems sometimes. Then it got really refined and well understood and what do you program games in now? Oh yeah thats right, C and its legacy. Because you'd have problems writing a 3D shooter in Java right now doesn't make the language suck ass. A couple years ago you couldn't write a 3D shooter in any language.
  • This is true about real time microcontrollers and the like that have code written knowing exactly how many clocks something will take. You can however write a compiler that will turn your java program into microcode or any other sort of code. Microcontrollers are funny things anyways, however you could impliment a realtime VM onto an MC. You can see a realtime JVM at www.rtjcom.com [rtjcom.com], stick that puppy on your MC then have it crank through some linear java apps compiled to bytecode. Java was originally meant to be run in the circutry of microcontrollers and tiny processors. Then Sun starting spitting out non-realtime JVMs which took the attention away from the fact their language was originally meant to run smart toasters. An MC running Java would be sort of like the BASIC stamps you can run that run BASIC code on the MC.
  • Non-deterministic FSA have the same capabilities as deterministic FSA. However, the minimal DFA with the same language as a minimal NFA may have an exponentially greater number of states. Neither have anything much to do with quantum computing, nor NP. In any case, nobody has demonstrated that a quantum computer can be used to solve any NP-hard problems in polynomial time (factoring is *not* NP-hard).

    This stuff gets rather confusing, and you need to be very specific in your terminology. My textbook on the topic was Languages and Machines, by Thomas A. Sudkamp. There are others that might be a little more accessible.

  • Zork and all the other early Infocom games used a VM (called the Z-machine) to run their games on 8-bit platforms. This VM spec is still used today for new IF games. Also, the Apple ][ ROM had an interpreter for performing 16-bit integer math calculations, called "Sweet 16". Applesoft itself was interpreted, like many other BASICs.

    The white paper is a crackpot spewing about "state of mind" and "genomes" and trying to appear academic. If he has any new ideas, I'm not able to penetrate the BS to find them. Turing machine == Von Neumann machine == any calculating device, so what's new here?

    If he was posting on USENET he would be using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS for certain KEY TERMS that expressed his REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS.
  • Doesn't the use of loops and functions to quicken the job of programing actualy slow down the process? for example... for a = 1 to 100 print $getline(a) increase A next a would be slower than... print $getline(1) print $getline(2) print $getline(3)...etc I would think not having to process the extra increase, and the if would speed it up. but also increase the size of the end program.


    Looping code can improves a program's use of CPU cache. In your second code example, huge loops would require many sequential code pages to be paged in from disk. Much more expensive than saving a i++ loop counter..

  • Neat stuff but ... it still doesn't address two big issues:
    1. On most platforms stack memory allocate is much faster than dynamic. As far as I know, Java does not support allocating structures on the stack.
    2. With limited resources, programmers need tight control over memory deallocation. While you can force a call to the GC, it is usually not a synchronous call. Sometimes you need to know all the memory from step 1 is free before going to to step 2.

    A bit about this paticular JVM. It does not support 64-bit data types. 64-bit PCI, PCI-X and Infiniband all require 64-bit addressing. That makes this unusable for most I/O adapters unless this JVM supports 64-bit addressing with its references types but hides it from the user.
    Oh well...
  • The JVM is what supports or does not support 32 bit addressing (as you're running a virtual computer inside of another) so a quick hack to certain things and a new minor version release and you've got 64-bit data structures. The hardware layers like PCI 2.1 and the like are not the responsibility of the JVM to handle. The OS kernel and device drivers handle those systems. If you wanted to stick Java on microcontrollers you'd just write a RT JVM or use something like the one in this article. Java at the high level doesn't support stack structures but if your JVM is running certain things as stacks it would be supported. Also if you want to be naughty you can add some I/O hacks to the JVM. Java does have the ability to communicate directly to its virtual machine so you could set up a workaround if you REALLY needed to stick it on super small chips. This however would require more work than just programming MCs in their native language.

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