I would say that writing a rudimentary VM is about as hard as generating LLVM IR. The difference is that the VM will have terrible performance and the LLVM IR will have pretty good performance.
But will it provide introspection, garbage collection, and low-level niceties the JVM provides?
Will I be able to interface with all the huge amount of available java libraries? I could interface with C/C++ but there's already a ffi story (as ugly as it is) with the jvm.
I think part of the appeal of rust and go and new languages is the ability to leave a mark, rewrite or port or rethink an existing library in the new language...
It's a kind of progress but it feels like a lot of waste sometimes. And I say that as an avid Ada developer.
