> On 2019-12-10, at 10:05 AM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Christoph,
> The image side is totally messy, 
> The VM side is also messy, so finding a combination that might work is a sport.

You're not wrong. I had a bit of fun with this stuff making the Raspberry Pi Scratch system handle linux non-ascii type keyboard input. An interesting problem there was that enabling the linux extension completely broke something else (that I can't remember at all) and made the whole attempt moot.


> To summarize: we have reached a point where we cannot change/add one feature without breaking one other (at least).
> The consequence is that we have some sort of "stable" status because we cannot change anything (the statu quo).

I suspect this is what happens to almost every complex project. I mean, look at how all the OS's get messed up and stall for years. They're all terrible right now.

Supporting old images means keeping the old messy VM code around. Doing something new and clean means a lot of work and probably using new primitives or some variety of flag to request use of the new code. Then we'd want to decide on a time to drop the old mess.

Lovely project! ;-)

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: DPC: Double Precision Crash