Goswin wrote:
> Hardly any business today has an inhomogene environment. And if the
> environment is homogene then the vm gives you 0 advantage. It just
> costs you overhead to emulate.

A Common Language Runtime (CLR) is an obvious counter example => the shared
VM gives you safe and high-level interoperability between languages. For
example, you can pass garbage collected data structures between languages by
reference because they share a single GC. Without a CLR, you generally
resort to painstakingly copying everything for no reason and give up for
anything non-trivial (like closures) and often end up with segmentation
faults and no working code.

I was once asked how someone might interoperate between Standard ML and
OCaml (two very closely related languages) and my answer was XMLRPC.
Contrast that with F# development where almost every program in existence
relies entirely upon seamless two-way interoperability with C# libraries
like WPF.

Cheers,
Jon.