[Vm-dev] What is the term for vm-display-null, vm-sound-ALSA etc??

[David T. Lewis]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 10:32:45AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>  
> On 18.07.2014, at 03:55, btc at openinworld.com wrote:
> 
> > To my mind, a module is something that might only be able to be bound at VM compile time, whereas a plugin could be bound to a running VM.  I guess that at some point of history there was only the former, and the latter came along later with new terminology?
> 
> Nope. Before the VM became modularized it was monolithic. Tim can tell you all about that process, but for sure one major point of breaking out parts of the VM into modules was to enable dynamic loading. That was there from the beginning.
> 
> The term "module" and "plugin" wrt the Squeak VM mean exactly the same thing, except the latter may be confused with the web browser plugin (which wraps the whole VM into a plugin loadable by a web browser).
> 

Also, we tend to speak of a VM "plugin" (such as FilePlugin) when we talk
about the Smalltalk + C source code modules, which may or may not be compiled
as runtime loadable modules ("internal" versus "external" modules). So the
terminology is not rigorously enforced ;-)

Dave