Book Image

Introduction to JVM Languages

By : van der Leun
Book Image

Introduction to JVM Languages

By: van der Leun

Overview of this book

Anyone who knows software development knows about the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine is responsible for interpreting Java byte code and translating it into actions. In the beginning, Java was the only programming language used for the JVM. But increasing complexity of the language and the remarkable performance of the JVM created an opening for a new generation of programming languages. If you want to build a strong foundation with the Java Virtual Machine and get started with popular modern programming languages, then this book is for you. The book will begin with a general introduction of the JVM and its features, which are common to the JVM languages, helping you get abreast with its concepts. It will then dive into explaining languages such as Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, and Groovy and will show how to work with each language, their features, use cases, and pros and cons. By writing example projects in those languages and focusing on each language’s strong points, it will help you find the programming language that is most appropriate for your particular needs. By the end of the book, you will have written multiple programs that run on the Java Virtual Machine and know about the differences between the various languages.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Frege (Haskell)

Frege, a dialect of the Haskell language, is arguably the first pure functional programming language for the JVM. In Frege, functions are first-class citizens and can be passed to other functions; variables are always immutable (the language simply does not supply any assignment statements) and methods created in the language have no side-effects.

Another difference from Clojure is that Frege is a statically typed language while Clojure is dynamically typed. Variables in Frege have a fixed type and the type must be known at compile time. Frege can infer the types, most of the time, from code, though.

Interestingly, the Frege compiler translates the Frege source code to Java and calls the standard JDK javac compiler to translate the generated Java code to Java bytecode.

The Frege website can be found here (at the time of writing this book, it simply redirected to...