Dan's worries about image size in the recent NCM thread reminded me to ask a question I had almost let slip out of my mind:- when/who/how is the VM going to get cleaned out; by which I mean to ask if anyone is actively pursuing moving many of the 'extra' prims out into Plugin- land thus making a minimum VM much more easy to produce?
It seems to me that all the serial, sound, socket, midi, etc stuff ought not be in the base VM code. Now that we can extend the VM with plugins, perhaps we can get back to a smaller prim table. I'd suggest that the basic VM ought to have no prims that are not required for the image to do a startup. There may be some exceptional prims that would be less useful with the small overhead of a plugin-call and that have to stay as normal prims. But otherwise even the file prims seem good candidates to move out!
Along with minimum images, headlessness and loadable partial-images, a small VM might make a practical scripting utility possible. It would certainly load and startup more rapidly.
So, is anyone already doing this?
tim