Some of it seems a bit ill informed and fanboy-ish though.
I'm not a JVM expert but claiming, for example, that "Hotspot [is] available wherever Java is available" is clearly false. Maybe he means JIT when he says Hotspot, but that's not true either.
The Zero and Shark projects are currently trying to bring OpenJDK and then a JIT to the platforms that Sun doesn't directly support (and even then doing it in a hacky way, as doing it for real i.e. rewriting Hotspot would be too much work):
And I'd love someone knowledgeable to compare the "free upgrades" you get from JVM updates to the same effect you get from GCC or LLVM improvements, Profile Guided Optimisation or updates in underlying libraries and OSes.
In general the summary could be "We build our wacky idiosyncratic language on top of a mature, well-engineered, portable system that was designed and built to do something else". Matz also built his Ruby on top of mature, well-engineered portable systems (Unix etc.) and while Ruby is cool and benefitted from building on that base, it wasn't magic pixie dust (or people wouldn't be so keen on JRuby).
I'm not a JVM expert but claiming, for example, that "Hotspot [is] available wherever Java is available" is clearly false. Maybe he means JIT when he says Hotspot, but that's not true either.
The Zero and Shark projects are currently trying to bring OpenJDK and then a JIT to the platforms that Sun doesn't directly support (and even then doing it in a hacky way, as doing it for real i.e. rewriting Hotspot would be too much work):
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/ZeroSharkFaq
And I'd love someone knowledgeable to compare the "free upgrades" you get from JVM updates to the same effect you get from GCC or LLVM improvements, Profile Guided Optimisation or updates in underlying libraries and OSes.
In general the summary could be "We build our wacky idiosyncratic language on top of a mature, well-engineered, portable system that was designed and built to do something else". Matz also built his Ruby on top of mature, well-engineered portable systems (Unix etc.) and while Ruby is cool and benefitted from building on that base, it wasn't magic pixie dust (or people wouldn't be so keen on JRuby).