From: Peter Suk <peter.kwangjun.suk@...>
Date: 2005-04-09T03:59:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Seven new VMs, all in a row

On Apr 8, 2005, at 1:27 PM, Saynatkari wrote:

> Thank you for that apology! Please understand you are speaking to
> a group of (mostly) interested _ruby_ developers, many of whom, I,
> for instance, have little or no experience with Smalltalk let alone
> its VM infrastructure. You announced the topic so I think it is fair
> to expect you to answer any reasonable questions from your audience
> considering our collective background.

It's fair I answer them once.  However, it is amusing that I'm getting 
a lot of questions in the vein of "Does Smalltalk have X?" where the 
answer is really: "Funny you should mention that, but arguably 
Smalltalk was X's first widespread commercial implementation.  
Smalltalk has had X for (over a decade | since the beginning in 1972.)"

> The project certainly seems interesting to me; I am somewhat reserved
> about it as I would rather see as much of the available talent to go
> to YARV development rather than various different projects but, then
> again, there seems to be a lot of talent to go around. Just produce
> code and ideas that can be reused! :)

Tell me that there will be a full-blown Object-image external to the 
VM, and that all of the language-specific meta-stuff will be expressed 
as first class Rite/Ruby Objects, to the point that *only* executing 
bytecodes and allocating/GC-ing Objects is done by the VM, and I will 
consider it!   (This means that even the language itself exists only in 
the image as 1st class Ruby/Rite Objects.)

--Peter

--
There's neither heaven nor hell, save what we grant ourselves.
There's neither fairness nor justice, save what we grant each other.