Hi all--

> Then of course we have Spoon - the "minimal Squeak project" that Craig
> is pulling - which probably could form a very good new "kernel image"
> on top of a new VM...

     Yes, I think that has a lot of potential.

> ...but despite some low level modification to the VM like his super
> proxies etc - he has AFAIK not yet touched the VM much.

     Well, I have, but I don't think it's a problem. :)

> On the other hand, a big chunk of C++ doesn't really sound like an
> attractive artifact - at least not to me ;). Ian has moved away from
> C++ as his choice of VM implementation platform (see idst/pepsi/coke
> etc) and Bryce is building Exupery entirely in Squeak itself.

     Yeah, I appreciate that we can't really do much about the fact that
 the Strongtalk VM is implemented with C++, but I also think that aspect
turns a lot of people off, even many of the VM-knowledgable ones. I must
admit I'm of them. I can claim to be a Squeak VM expert at this point
(from my Spoon work), but I'm also utterly seduced by the great
metacircular implementation by Dan et al (even though it could certainly
be improved a lot... that's another thing I know from the Spoon work :).
I run the VM-in-Squeak all the time, I can't do a lot of my work without
it, etc.

     But it looks like I might just be one of the people in this project
who gets to sit up in object memory and make demands about how the
execution machinery should behave. :)


-C

-- 
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume