[Squeak-e] Programming the VM
Mark S. Miller
markm at caplet.com
Mon Feb 3 13:22:07 CET 2003
At 11:15 AM 2/3/2003 Monday, Colin Putney wrote:
>Whoa, hang on guys. I may be missing something here, but I think we're still
>a long way from making these kinds of decisions.
I agree.
>I'm still trying to get my
>head around the idea of multiple levels of virtualization which don't
>involve multiple levels of interpretation. Let's talk little more about the
>concepts involved here before we worry about how to lay out object headers
>in the VM.
>
>Mark, it seems to me that the machines in your virtualization frame work are
>instances of the reified mechanisms I mentioned in my first post. This would
>include things like object memory, interpreter, compiler, compiled methods,
>activation stacks etc. On the hardware level these would be actual CPUs, RAM
>etc. Then we'd have the abstractions of these provided by the OS: processes,
>virtual memory etc. Then we have the Squeak-E executable, with *its*
>abstractions, the things I was referring to originally: Class, Compiler,
>Processor, Display, thisContext, MethodDictionary, etc.
>At deeper levels of virtualization, it looks like we'd need separate
>reifications of these abstractions, that are limited in scope to the
>virtualization level that we're dealing with.
You've now baked this idea more than I have, and I'm not quite following
you. I hope I didn't give the impression that I knew where I was going with
all this? ;)
In any case, what you say sounds plausible. Let's try fleshing things out
and see.
>These would effectively be
>capabilities for manipulating the virtualization subtree rooted at that
>(virtual) machine.
Yes!
>Is that making sense?
The last part, yes. The previous parts I'd have to think about harder than I
have time for right now, sorry. (Other, much less interesting things are
taking my time right now. I'm not even drawing diagrams ;).)
----------------------------------------
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain
Cheers,
--MarkM
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