Support For Dynamic Languages
The Java Virtual Machine provides some support for dynamically typed languages. Most of the existing JVM instruction set is statically typed - in the sense that method calls have their signatures type-checked at compile time, without a mechanism to defer this decision to run time, or to choose the method dispatch by an alternative approach.
JSR 292 (Supporting Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java™ Platform) added a new invokedynamic instruction at the JVM level, to allow method invocation relying on dynamic type checking (instead of the existing statically type-checked invokevirtual instruction). The Da Vinci Machine is a prototype virtual machine implementation that hosts JVM extensions aimed at supporting dynamic languages. All JVMs supporting J2SE 7 also include the invokedynamic opcode.
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