[Vm-beginners] Pros/Cons of VM Instruction sets

[Philip Bernhart]

Hello,

what are the good things and the bad things in the
Squeak VM instruction sets?

I wondered especially if the VM instruction set is
"okey-ish" from the security perspective after reading
Alan Kays "Early History of Smalltalk" as he admired
especially in there the Burrough B5000 mainframe computer
and it seems to me that some of its design decisions were
introduced into following Smalltalk VM implementations.

Also it seems to me, that there were experiments at Xerox Parc
where you sent someone an object for evaluation and received
the computation result, which kind of needs a "secure" instruction
set. I know that in these times, the security was basically not
present. Still I wonder of how the instruction set was considered
to be secure as some minimal thought was present it seems to me.

Also what are the performance / memory implications from the instruction
sets?


Thanks for your time,
Philip