Oups, did a private reply to mark. Mark is there a way to set the "reply-to" field of the mailing list to the mailing list itself?
Thanks
-------- Message original -------- Sujet: Re: [Tachyon-list] Inspiration: Self Klein's Metacircular Virtual Machine Kit Date : Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:48:05 -0400 De : Erick Lavoie erick.lavoie@gmail.com Pour : Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca
There is still a couple of things that worries me. Given that they were mostly three working on Klein and that they never achieve a level of performance similar to their C++ implementation, I feel that the problem of boostrapping a system efficiently (in terms of development time) to achieve both simplicity and performance is not completely understood and therefore risky.
What I get from the paper, is that tools for inspecting and debugging the VM are of paramount importance but can be really tricky to get right. That's something we should take into account in planning the work ahead. At this point, I find it really hard to assess the amount of work in front of us.
I can't completely nail it yet, but there is something that makes meta-circular implementation of live systems a lot harder to think about than plain layered systems with different "languages" for each of the layers.
To be successful, I think we will have to learn as much as we can from other projects. Talking about tools, I think the Maxine VM inspector is really interesting.
http://wikis.sun.com/display/MaxineVM/Inspector
Still interesting to note that Sun lost interest in the Klein project but still kept the idea of meta-cicularity...
Erick
Le 29/04/10 19:30 , Marc Feeley a écrit :
Nice find Erick. Well what can I say... the reasons they mention for Klein being metacircular are pretty much what I was saying for Tachyon.
Marc
On 2010-04-29, at 5:16 PM, Erick Lavoie wrote:
"In constructing Klein, we have attempted to adhere to various principles, including object-orientation, metacircularity, heavy code reuse, reactiveness, and mirror-based reflection. We expect these principles to yield many benefits, including: • A simpler, more malleable VM (because it is written almost entirely in a high-level language). • Less replicated code (because the VM and the applications running on top of it are written in the same language and can share code, as can the VM and its development environment). • Better performance (because the VM will be able to do optimizations across the entire code base, including the VM code itself - imagine being able to inline the hotspots of the VM right up into an application). • Faster turnaround when making changes to the VM (because the VM will no longer be tied to C++ and its compilation system)." http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/
However, the current version is not complete yet as a lot of things are yet to be done.
Erick _______________________________________________ Tachyon-list mailing list Tachyon-list@iro.umontreal.ca https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/tachyon-list