Corporate rivals have temporarily sunk their differences to find ways to fine-tune the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to a variety of popular dynamic languages.

Language experts from IBM, Microsoft, and others have converged on Sun Microsystems' Santa Clara campus for a three-day workshop to find ways of delivering Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the VM that drives Sun's platform.

Among those heading to Sun's offices were computer languages expert and Microsoft architect Erik Meijer - who helped create the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and Microsoft's experimental Volta tools language - and representatives from IBM's Project Zero putting PHP on a JVM.

Also, there were Sun's JRuby lead Charlie Nutter and John Rose, leading a Sun effort called the Da Vinci Machine building extensions to run non-Java languages on the VM with a similar level of performance as Java.

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