Eliminating superclass lookup in the VM (and dynamic composition of behavior)

Anthony Hannan ajh18 at cornell.edu
Thu Dec 12 04:14:59 UTC 2002


"Stephen Pair" <spair at acm.org> wrote:
> If I understand the direction of things to come...with dynamic
> compilation, we should eventually have systems where there is no
> traditional VM...everything that we consider to be VM code today would
> be written in Smalltalk (or whatever language) and dynamically
> translated to machine code.  In that case, there is no VM/Smalltalk
> distinction, so you couldn't hide the optimizations in the VM even if
> you wanted to (because there is no VM).

I agree.  I see know distinction between the image and VM and would like
to see the VM be all objects some day.  That is one of the reasons I
exposed the stack in my VI4 implementation.

> And that leads leads to another thought...for a long time, we've tried
> to build the VM such as to protect a person working in Smalltalk from
> being able to crash the system (which of course is not a attainable in
> any practical sense)...but, without a VM, we will need another mechanism
> for layering (or securing) the system...which I guess feeds into
> "Subjective Squeak" thread...so I'll stop with that.

I agree again.

Cheers,
Anthony



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