General

[Dark_Destiny66]

Does sony plan to support the Java language in the future, this is not that C# is a bad language but many people are more skilled at Java than C#, and some of them (like me) don't really want to learn C# especially for PS vita but would love to develop on this plateform. I don't think that would be a hugde pain for sony to support Java as a VM already exist for ARM CPUs (Dalvik). The only bad thing is Oracle license on Java... which I thing, is the main reason why sony used C# instead of Java...

[MartinCaine]

I very much doubt the Oracle license is the reason why Sony have chosen C# over Java. C# is very widely used as a game development tool and is supported by most major game engines as a scripting language now. The platform also seems to be closely modelled on XNA and I'm guessingthe choice to use C# was to make it easy to get all the XNA indie developers to come over to the platform.

As far as Java support goes, there's no current intention to support it but it could be possible in the future.

[alxpwn]

Java, Basic ... the requests lately scare me. Java VM is resource consuming and tiresome and absolutly not for making games, everyone is better of with the current C# and Mono combo.

[Dark_Destiny66]

And you think the mono VM is not resource consuming alxpwn?

I'm not saying that C# is bad (even if I don't like how mono ported it, against microsoft will, at its begining).

But sony will surely get more developper for the PS vita if they do not restrict their PS suite to C# only. Just take a look at this http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html. You'll see that Java is the second/first most used programming language and C# is at rank 4/5. For me at least, as a Java C/C++ developer, I do not plan to make any app on the PS vita yet (even if I would love to), because I'm more comfortable with these languages, so developping for android devices would be a better choice. I don't think I'm the only one in this case, and of course we cannot force sony to do this, but I asked this because I saw somewhere that they are planning to support more languages.

[MoshHN]

Perhaps IKVM is an option.

[alxpwn]

It's pretty excessive to maintain different compilers for so many plattforms. I don't think that there will be support for any other language any time soon. C# is pretty easy to learn if you know Java, I don't get the problem.

About the MonoVM, you are sure it really runs on top of a real VM? Check i.e. Monotouch, it is Mono and doesn't need a VM at all. Mono is much more than native .NET byte code these days and pretty flexible. Since xamarin guys are floating around the forums as well, we can assume that this Mono env was as well pretty fitted to the target plattforms.

If it comes to popularity (here is a better chart with more info btw: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-top-10-programming-languages), not every language is great for every application. And Java isn't really my fav choice for anything, especially with Oracle in the back. They are draining everything out of Java, see the Android lawsuite. Looking at this, I somehow believe that google is even regretting the use of java these days.

[jamesnorman91]

Hi all,

We do have plans for supporting other programming languages in the future, however at this stage we cannot confirm the schedule for this and the programming languages that we will be targeting.

You can find the roadmap in the documentation under Related Pages > Other Information > SDK Roadmap.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them here.

Thanks
James