Paul,
I saw this post on squeak-dev. When looking at the software I noticed that it has built in support for ASN.1. I'm not sure if it will be of any help to what you are working on but I thought I'd point it out to you, if you want to take a look at their code.
Ron
-----Original Message----- From: squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Todd Blanchard Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2006 10:02 PM To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list Subject: Re: yet another smallest snapshot, and a visualization
I just got an introduction to erlang, this sounds kind of like that. Lots of interesting concepts worthy of theft in that language.
On Jan 21, 2006, at 10:56 AM, Colin Putney wrote:
On Jan 21, 2006, at 12:28 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:
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
Indeed. The end result would be message-passing concurrency, rather than shared-state concurrency. Each VM instance would be a Vat/ Island/Task and you'd have distant object references for sending messages between them. VM instances could also be on a separate thread, in a separate process or on a separate machine, depending on what kind of performance characteristics you were looking for, pretty much transparently. Beautiful.