[Vm-dev] HackerNews + vm-dev = a lightbulb saying "STACK!"

[Colin Putney]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:

> Right now I'm redesigning the bytecode set to lift limits on branch distances, number of literals, and number of inst vars.  So a small increment.

I suppose that Newspeak is different from Smalltalk in terms of the
size and complexity of methods that it encourages. It could be that
the existing limits are blocking the development of Newspeak, and
obviously legacy code is much less of an issue for Newspeak than
Squeak.

But… isn't that an odd cost/benefit mismatch? It would seem that
switching instruction sets isn't easy, even given VM support. Are
there no other changes that could/should be made at the same time?  Is
this something we could imagine doing more than once in the near
future?

Colin