On 20-Jan-06, at 5:53 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi Craig -
>
>>     When you run the 1337 snapshot, the virtual machine gets the  
>> object address ("oop") for the special-objects array from the  
>> snapshot header (first 60 bytes). Indirectly from that array  
>> (through the Processor and its active process) it finds the active  
>> context and continues execution.
>
> This is interesting to me. Do you think it is feasable to take out  
> all of the process management from the VM and put it back in, say,  
> via a plugin?
I think so. No need for the special objects array or Processor  
instance if the saved context oop is either explicitly saved in the  
image header or simply put somewhere by convention (like nil true and  
false used to be) which would be trivial with Craig's version of the  
tracer. You could start a copy of a VM for each process and terminate  
it when the process concludes. This VM would need no process handling  
stuff such as wakeHighestPriority but might need some semaphore stuff?
Debugging might be fun. Coordinating threads would have the potential  
for getting to be as awful as java. On the other hand it wold be an  
interesting way of making completely separated cells of objects each  
running their own process and having to communicate only via proper  
interfaces instead of messing in a global object soup. All sorts of  
fun possibilities if one has the tim and funding

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Machine-independent:  Does not run on any existing machine.