On 8-Jul-08, at 1:01 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
> - a system built in this way doesn't have to be a complete  
> Smalltalk.  It can, for example, omit a compiler, or omit reflective  
> parts of the system without which one couldn't inspect, make  
> modifications to the class hierarchy, decompile, etc, etc.  So a  
> system built from teh ground up is much more easily made secure.
It could also be a very minimalist image intended to perform a single  
specific task and then die. As a (probably dumb) example, spawn out an  
image with just enough capability to load a webpage from a specific  
URL and write the content somewhere for later use. If you have a  
machine with  thousands of cores available this might be a useful way  
of fetching net content.
Instead of starting up a thread (or ten) and scheduling it and having  
worries about semaphores and global access etc,   leave it to an image  
that can only do the job you want. Remove all the multi-thread stuff  
from the system and use one image, one thread of control.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
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