On Nov 1, 2007, at 2:10 , John M McIntosh wrote:

>
> On Oct 31, 2007, at 6:00 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
>
>> tim Rowledge wrote:
>>> Yes, we could probably rewrite a lot of code currently in C  
>>> source files and put it into Slang methods. Yes, we could  
>>> probably improve Slang (we tried to get some of that done at  
>>> Interval but ran out of time) to be more friendly. Yes, we could  
>>> do lots of things. Got time to do them? Or money to pay me/Craig/ 
>>> Andreas/Ian/John/Mike/Bryce/whoever to do it fulltime? That's the  
>>> kind of thing that would be required to be able to make any major  
>>> changes
>>
>> Well, but let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.  
>> Improvements would be welcome, in particular if they are easy to  
>> review and to integrate. It is probably unwise to start this as  
>> the lets-rewrite-the-vm-and-its-tools-from-scratch approach but  
>> there are plenty of things that we could do better. For example, I  
>> would welcome a patch that enables the code generator to  
>> optionally build the entire VM as an object. That'd be a very nice  
>> stepping stone towared a multi-threaded VM and can probably be  
>> done in a fairly incremental way.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>  - Andreas
>
> Well building the interpreter.c file to use a single structure for  
> globals and then setup a pointer to that allocated structure  
> somewhere is trivial as compared to the other ideas kicked about.
> However to complete this concept is you need to move the support  
> code and plugins to use memory hung off the interpreter structure  
> for their globals, that is a more time consuming
> process, but certainly not difficult, unlike oh concurrent multi- 
> threaded GC algorithms.

The idea was to use a GIL for that problem.

- Bert -