I really like the idea of having one VM for many languages, but having just watched the Google IO video on V8, I think there might be some real performance advantages to specialized engines.
An specialized VM (both for the source language and the deployment architecture) would leave anything generic in the dust. Languages do not have the same usage; the truly unique ones (i.e. worth learning) encourge different programming styles. The G-Machine is as different from the Warren Machine is as different from a SECD machine and all are different from P-CODE machine or an SKI graph reduction machine.
Smilarly, a custom made application DSP would rape any other binary for a stock hardware platform of the same speed (ignoring all costs, of course.)
If you wrote a specialized VM's for Python, Perl, Smalltalk, Ruby, and JavaScript on the x86 would they have any components that were largely identical?
I would postulate that there are features of a VM that are common, like garbage collection.
It would be worthwhile to work out the features common to many VM implementations and put them in hardware. Until that happens, sharing some of a VM implementation seems useful.
I'd be willing to bet that most general purpose languages that are in mainstream use could easily share the majority of their compiler/interpreter code. The main differences are in which combination of features are included and the syntax that you use.
Why put them in hardware? That sounds like an awful lot of extra silicon for every single architecture. Wouldn't it be better to have a higher level software abstraction like Parrot that you just build everything else on top of?
An specialized VM (both for the source language and the deployment architecture) would leave anything generic in the dust. Languages do not have the same usage; the truly unique ones (i.e. worth learning) encourge different programming styles. The G-Machine is as different from the Warren Machine is as different from a SECD machine and all are different from P-CODE machine or an SKI graph reduction machine.
Smilarly, a custom made application DSP would rape any other binary for a stock hardware platform of the same speed (ignoring all costs, of course.)