From: avi@...4.com (Avi Bryant)
Date: 2003-08-29T13:17:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Why would you abandon Ruby? (was)

Michael Slater writes:

> HotSpot came from Longview Technologies, a company Sun acquired.
> It had nothing to do with any internal Sun project.

I said HotSpot was "derived from Self".  The full story, as I
understand it, is somewhat longer: some of the Self team left Sun to
form Animorphic Systems, with the aim of building a commercial
Smalltalk product - Strongtalk - that built on the optimization
techniques from Self.  Animorphic was also known as, or was a
subsidiary, of Longview - so when Sun bought Longview they were
effectively buying the Strongtalk VM.  This was retargeted to Java
(though before or after the buyout I don't know), and became HotSpot.

There's some more info on this in [ruby-talk:22865] if you're
interested.