On 21-Jan-06, at 10:56 AM, Colin Putney wrote:

>
> On Jan 21, 2006, at 12:28 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:
>> [snip] 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.
>
That's about it. It is not a million miles from stuff some of us were  
fantasizing about a while ago (1988 or thereabouts) in UK as part of  
an Esprit project. As with so many Esprit projects it went nowhere as  
the money was siphoned off to the mafia and other corporate slush  
funds and then the people scattered to the four winds. Maybe we could  
actually do it this time round? Anyone interested in funding the work  
properly?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: IG: Insert Garbage