What would Sun do if a new language suddenly spiked in popularity? Have the language run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), according to the “father of Java” James Gosling.

Speaking at the Sun Tech Days in Sydney, Gosling told Builder AU that Sun would definitely look at making the new language run on the JVM for a number of reasons.

“For one you get serious rocket-science optimisers, for another you get really good interoperability between languages,” he said.

Gosling also cited the interoperability benefits that the JVM could provide, enabling developers to use each language in its chosen niche while avoiding the language’s pitfalls.

“In a lot of languages, they don’t really mesh well with other parts of the system being written in other languages, and if you’ve got something like the JVM it makes it work a whole lot better,” he said.

“People have done amazingly interesting jobs of having other languages run on top of the JVM.”