I think it should be a subset of DOM / CSS designed for speed and flexibility. A normal browser could render the page correctly but an optimized browser for apps would be able to make some assumptions to render everything much faster. Something like asm.js but for DOM/CSS.
Notice how the ball in Pirlo's free kick is barely spinning, goes very fast and the path is very unpredictable. It's called a "Folha seca" and it exploits the turbulences to make the ball drop at the last moment. Very spectacular, but hard to score consistently.
It's spinning, and the amount of curve matches the amount of speed. The unpredictability comes from the fact that the axis is also spinning, but very slowly. It's hard to get the topspin and rotation on the ball, and still hit the target. But these guys train shots for a living.
This is the same principle that makes a knuckleball drop unpredictably and very, very difficult to control. The way that a great pitcher can control a baseball is amazing to watch.
As mentioned above, I'm regularly talking with Ravenbrook about liberalizing the license on MPS and doing some work on modernizing it. I've hopes that that might happen this year.
And some of the language specific ones are pretty good ... SGen in Mono seems interesting. The GC in ClozureCL is interesting as well.
garbage collectors are tightly integrated with the programming alnguage and runtime. Different languages, architectures, etc have different requirements from a GC...
libgarbagecollector is a plug-in garbage collector library designed to be used by high level language implementors. It's used in the Io programming language.
Nokia can always embrace Android and become another Samsung. They seem to have lost the opportunity to build a solid alternative with the Symbian/Maemo/Meego/Win8 mess.
Maybe a Maemo with Android Apks support could save them?
I think Go, Mono, Ruby, Python et al should team up to create a reusable garbage collector library that can compete with the OpenJDK one. For me, it's the single biggest piece falling behind on non JVM languages. The performance and "tunnability" are unmatched right now. Bonus points would be for a real time garbage collector, a la IBM Metronome.
In this same thread Martin Odersky announces he is working in a new version of the Scala plugin for Eclipse, to be released with Scala 2.9. A statically typed language really shines within an IDE.
