Catching up with my students' e-mail - Alisdair sent me a copy of the following announcement:

The alpha release of Internet C++ has been announced. Internet C++ is intended to be an open alternative to both Java and C#; it's essentially C++ which runs on a portable virtual machine. They have even ported Doom to the new system...

http://www.lwn.net/daily/internet-c++.php3

http://www.xmission.com/~icvm/

High-speed applications over the Internet, such as 3D games, will provide a new medium for advertisers to attract target audiences with. Since most games are played for many hours at a time, these types of applications will provide captive audiences for advertisers for long periods of time.

and later on in the same white paper the designer outlines the design rationale of the VM:

The virtual machine for Internet C++ (ICVM) uses a register set and model that can be mapped directly on top of hardware registers, for maximum speed and performance. ICVM also contains many new compiler-friendly addressing modes to obtain maximum speed and efficiency. Internet C++ was designed specifically to allow 3D-games and other high speed applications to be developed and/or ported for Internet use.

In addition, the virtual machine (ICVM) supports dual endian binaries as its native file format. There are no speed penalties related to endian on any platform. The virtual machine will execute the program in the host machine's native endian.

In fact the VM looks like it has been most heavily influenced by the architecture of the Pentium. I guess you could forgive this since Internet C++ is primarily PC-centric. Regardless of the merit of yet another Java-killer I have to wonder if there really is the demand for such a development. Perhaps the fact that the designer(s) will publish the full source code to Internet C++ and all it's components may help to leverage its adoption. Interestingly, the first port of Internet C++ was developed on Red Hat Linux 6.0 and uses a combination of BSD and GNU libraries as its core. Initial target platforms will be most UNIX-like operation systems, including most current Linux platforms, most current BSD platforms, and Solaris 7 (86 version). Ports are also planned for Windows 32 environments.

In other words, it's vaporware at the moment! I'd love to know what sandboxing there is in the VM. At the moment it sounds like a recipe for viral infection on a global scale.