Which Programming Language Was First To Use Virtual Machine?

Question

I Previously Assumed that it was java(i was wrong), am reading stuff on smalltalk, I was amazed when i read this paragraph

"Smalltalk has a very special place in computer science history. It appeared publicly around the early 80s as a product of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). It was pretty different than the programming languages that far in regards to its vision in object oriented programming and the syntax and environment it used to realize this method of thinking. Also it was using a virtual machine concept that was not popular at the time."

Wow it uses Virtual Machine. So it also means that Need of "Cross Platform" was felt So long ago..????

Answer 1

Allegedly [1], the O-code machine for BCPL was the first virtual-machine–like thing, from the “late 60s”. The UCSD-Pascal p-code (often referred to as the first one) followed in the “early 70s” [2]

So, depending on who you will Ask, it is either Pascal or BCPL.

Answer 2

Well, AFAIK, LISP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)), which is from 1958, already had a Virtual Machine.

Is truth (again, AFAIK), that was Smalltalk the first in popularise the term (and the first in been attacked as "non performant", "it will never scale", etc.), but certainly, it was not the first one :)

Answer 3

Actually Python appeared around the same time that Java appeared having also a VM . I am not sure exactly if it was from first version (most likely it is because its a very fundamental how cPython works) but it does use a VM. VM as concept predates Smalltalk and most likely it even predates Lisp too. Probably there are other languages too that fill the gaps in the history of the VM.

Portability was forever an issue. I know that when I first started using computers and coding back in 1988 there were already a lot of OSes and hardware system architectures arounds. CP/M vs MAC OS vs AmigaOS vs Dos vs Unix vs .... so its kinda hard not to feel the need for a VM back then.

I think we see more VMs nowdays mainly because of the available processing power on low budget computers.

Answer 4

Smalltalk started using a virtual machine around 1969, which I think counts as really early 70's... Don't be misled by the moniker "Smalltalk-80" - that wasn't the first version and isn't the latest.

Answer 5

• Above

  I don't have too much reputation to post more than two links. All highlight item can be found in the Timeline of programming languages OR the Wikipedia.

• The p-code term p-code first appeared in the early 1970s.

  Two early compilers generating p-code were the Pascal-P compiler in 1973, by Nori, Ammann, Jensen, Hageli, and Jacobi, and the Pascal-S compiler in 1975, by Niklaus Wirth.

• The O-code machine is in the late 1960s.

  The O-code machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Martin Richards in the late 1960s to give machine independence to BCPL. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.

• The IPL is at about 1956.

  Information Processing Language (IPL) is a programming language created by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon at RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology at about 1956. From IPL-V programming's reference manual in chapter 1.2 says: the language should be run in a program called IPL-V interpretive system. And Lisp is another story after IPL.

• Short Code Language in 1949 from Timeline of programming languages.

  From Timeline of programming languages list, you may find the oldest one. But I think the upper three are not the oldest. The Short Code in 1949 looks like a virtual machine language from these words: "Along with basic arithmetic, Short Code allowed for branching and calls to a library of functions. The language was interpreted and ran about 50 times slower than machine code."