A year after Microsoft Corp. released its popular .NET application framework under a free license to enable vendor-agnostic use cases, IBM Corp. is preparing to open-source a homegrown development technology of own that holds the potential to make an even bigger impact on the software world. OMR is a toolkit that implements the lessons the company’s engineers learned from creating its runtime system for Java to speed up code execution across potentially the entire gamut of programming languages used in the enterprise.

Big Blue claims to have invested hundreds of person years in the development of IBM SDK Java Technology Edition since its inception more than a decade ago, an effort that reflects the difficulty of building a competitive runtime system. The undertaking requires not only a large number of expensive engineers with a thorough understanding of the mechanics involved in turning raw source code into fully functioning applications but also a continuous investment to keep up with technological advancements. Every new chip series that enters the market up, for one, introduces improvements to code execution that have to be incorporated into the runtime.

That applies not only to processors from Intel Corp. but also the power-efficient ARM Holdings plc designs that are starting to find use in large data centers and IBM’s own POWER series. The hardware changes are joined by even more advances in the software layer that together add up to a massive amount of work for runtime maintainers. And that’s just for one runtime system. In the majority of organizations that use multiple languages in their projects, the problem becomes exponentially larger until developers find themselves with applications that run considerably slower than they could be under optimal conditions.

OMR aims to change the situation by making the core components of IBM SDK Java Technology Edition, including the compiler that translates source code into a machine-readable form, available for reuse in other runtimes. If the project gain enough traction after its launch, then the developer ecosystem will be able to react much faster when a new chip or software optimization emerges and join forces to implement the necessary changes in IBM’s toolkit instead of separately repeating the process for every language.  QMR could thereby not only enable applications to run faster but also free up the open-source community to create new programming features that can help software engineers become even more efficient in their work.

Such an outcome would directly benefit Big Blue, which is seeing more and more of its enterprise customers abandon Java in favor of more modern alternatives as part of a shift that a recent Red Hat Inc. study indicates will only accelerate over time. The company is already working on making QMR compatible with Ruby and Python. with support for other languages presumably due to arrive further down the line.

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