Gerardo Richarte (CORE-SDI) wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Doug Way wrote:
>
> > Still, after playing around with Squeak for a few months, there are some
> > things I'd like to see moved to the base image.  Something
>
>         I'd like to see WeakArrays and swAPIs moved to the base image, mostly becouse they need VM recompilation. I think that sqAPIs portability should be checked befor moving it into the base image. I've been working on it myself, but I found some problems I c
> ouldn't deal with beacouse I needed more time than what I had... too sad...

I am not a VM hacker, but does the VM have to be architected as a single executable program? Why can't the very core of the Smalltalk, messaging, be put into a single executable program, and then have the other parts loaded as DLLs/plugins. Then only portions of the
VM need to be recompiled. Part of what would be necessary would be for primitive calls to be "doubly dimensioned", i.e. a primitive indicates both the primitive number AND the module. I would think this would make the VM much more scalable. I would argue for a break
down something like:

Core executable
Allocator/GC plug in
BitBlt/Graphic plug in
File/Socket plug in
Sound plug in
Input device plug in
etc..

--
Travis Griggs
Key Technology
tgriggs at keyww.com
Smalltalk - 100% Pure Objects, Always had 'em, Always will!