[self-interest] dynamic deoptimization (was: ARM?)

[Russell Allen]

Hi

On 12/12/2011, at 7:58 PM, Thorsten Dittmar wrote:

> I'm interested in general , to get self more selfish. If we would be able to manifest the principles of self even more accurate and more evident, that would be something great.

Agreed.  To paraphrase a Lisp saying, Self is an inadequate Self. But its a good place to start!

> For that reason I thought that the Klein VM would be one of the right steps.

Maybe in the longer term, I think.  And I agree with your other comments on improving the Self side of things (which the exception maybe of exception handling, which I'm still suspicious of :)

> I would support two things regarding to the VM
> 
> 1. if needed and helpful, cleaning up and simplify the current VM and the building process
> 2. if we will find the right people and enough money, reactivating Klein and bring it to the next level
> 3. I'm very skeptical, but if more wise people say, that it makes sense to adapt one of the other VM implementations (mentioned in earlier mails), this would be an option as well

I will help fund cleaning up and simplifying the current VM.  It is necessary, otherwise Apple or Ubuntu or GCC will make some change and we won't be able to compile and that'll be the end. Try finding money or resources to resurrect a platform that no longer compiles or runs - it would be impossible. Bitrot is our enemy.

That should also as a side effect give us easier bindings to existing third party libraries such as QT or SDL, which gives us better and easier graphics, fonts, sounds, movie playing etc on Linux and Mac, Libevent which gives us high quality networking etc.

It also gives us opportunities for other interesting stuff. Personally I'd like to try baking SQLite into the VM and making snapshots actual databases including the saved objects. That gives us easy versioning and ability to create baked in object databases, while still retaining a single file snapshot with all its advantages, including the advantage that a wide variety of third party tools could read it in a pinch.

But all this needs the groundwork done.

I don't think that Klein or adapting another VM make sense at this point in time, personally.

- Russell