[self-interest] Re: VM plug-in (was: JSelf Home Page)

[Steve Dekorte]

Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at lsi.usp.br> wrote:
> There are easy (but slow) ways and there are hard (but a little
> less slow) ways to do it. Many people have asked me to do this
> over the years, so I looked into it.

I'm interested in the details of the hard way. I see a problem with 
the slow way - If Java is 10x slower than C, and a JSelf within Java 
is 10x slower than Java, then it's use will be limited to simple 
scripting which isn't very interesting.

> Why not a plug-in?

A plug-in is fine, as long as it's just as easy to install.
With a COM object, installation = 1 or 2 button clicks.
The last plug-in I tried to install was Cocoa and it wasn't easy.

> One problem with a Self or Smalltalk VM plug-in is that it needs
> a rather complete image to work with (see Dolphin Smalltalk for
> an example). What we need is a way to split up the image into
> tiny pieces that can be loaded on demand.

NewtonScript soups did this. I didn't like some of the details
of their implementation but it's worth taking a look at.

Steve
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