Scala can also host the JVM (well, a subset of it, enough to run itself): https://github.com/lihaoyi/Metascala

http://www.dzone.com/links/videopresentation_compiling_scala... for a video on the project, explaining the rationale etc by the author.

Not working. This one is, though: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Scala-LLVM

Note: It seems the author hasn't had time working on this project for the last couple of months. Still, I think it might be interesting for others to know about this project, maybe someone wants to play around with this.

Indeed. I just found this yesterday, and it is an interesting project. Not sure I'll be able to contribute in the next few months, but I certainly will "play around" with it.

Do you know how complete this is at the moment?

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I really wish that somebody would continue working on this as I think it is an awesome project. My CS knowledge is not deep enough to work on this myself, I fear. The author wrote this about the project in February (on the mailing list):

"So, it's not dead but there's (currently) noone working on it besides me and my time for it is very limited (to barely more than zero over the last year). I'm hopeful that I'll be able to find more time, hopefully around summer. That said, if anyone is interested in working on it, I'm more than happy to have the help. I do promise to make some time to work with potential contributors, but as you can see my latency can be pretty bad at times. "

And last year in June he wrote this: "Also, most any normal scala program will not work since many parts of the standard library are not compatible yet with LLVM (because of java library dependencies)."

Which probably still stands as there's no way to easily convert the java library to Scala and then to llvm.

There is a way to convert Java straight to LLVM. I would guess the developer is already aware of that though

https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/java/trunk/docs/java-front...

The LLVM FAQ states, however:

> There is an incomplete version of a Java front end available in the java module. There is no documentation on this yet so you'll need to download the code, compile it, and try it.

Theres a talk from ScalaDays last year (I think) where the answer is basically "its not"

"This is the paper presented at the Second Scala Workshop to be held at Stanford on June 2nd 2011."

Not a good sign.

This project is so cool, only Elixir on Xen could be just as cool.

There's OCaml on Xen (http://www.xenproject.org/developers/teams/mirage-os.html).

Holycrap, exokernel is the most brilliant idea I've heard today. I don't have to mess with sk_buffer anymore!

Years ago there was lots of excitement about exokernels coming out of MIT. They haven't gotten anywhere much, yet.

Sure they have, you'd just have to look deep inside google to see their influence, probably.

I wonder, how is this different from the venerable VM/CMS approach?

Their "unikernels" paper was one of the most brilliant I've read in months.

I think that is rather straightforward: http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2013/05/02/elixir-on-xen/

Most of the work really is on the Erlang side of things.

Am I missing something about the terminology? This claims to be an "LLVM backend for Scala" which sounds wrong. Perhaps you want a backend that compiles LLVM AST to JVM bytecode. Or perhaps you want a Scala frontend that compiles Scala to LLVM AST.

Unless they really intend to compile LLVM AST into Scala ... and then what?

"LLVM backend for the Scala compiler". There ya go, no ambiguity.

What's front or back depends obviously on what your point of view is: Scala or LLVM.