On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Chris Cunnington
<smalltalktelevision at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure I caught it myself. Something about a single process vm, but I
> thought the vm was already single process. Then I sort of got the idea all
> the processes in the ProcessBrowser would be gone and there would be one
> process. This had to do with... I didn't get it, quite.

That's right, there would only be one Process... or, ultimately, no
Process class, but just thisContext and its senders. The idea would be
to get rid of concurrency within the image, and replace it with many
images executing concurrently and communicating with each other.

This would be an improvement for several reasons:

1. We'd have parallelism as well as concurrency. Each image/vm would
run in a separate OS process, and potentially on different processors,
allowing us to make use of multiprocessor hardware.

2. Since each image would have its own object memory, there would be
no shared state between images, and that would simplify the
programming model. We'd still have to worry about coordination between
images, but we'd never run into bugs because of state being changed
when we weren't expecting it.

3. It would be a better fit for the kind of hardware that we seem to
be moving towards—highly distributed systems without a single coherent
address space.

Colin