Weldon Washburn wrote:
You advocate starting from a clean slate.
[Interpreting the above as a comment about the harmony project as a
whole...]
That's not my position at all.
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200505.mbox/[EMAIL
PROTECTED]
I advocate a model where we identify what's at the table and leverage
that as far as we can in building the Harmony VM. We mustn't start with
a clean slate as we have so much in front of us. I've outlined a
specific approach in the above email which involves seeding the project
with existing VMs and concurrently building a new core or cores which
will utilize existing (and new) components.
When I say "identify what's at the table", I mean that very broadly. I
mean, everything from entire code bases, through to code for components,
through to the availability of external components (the boehm collector
for example, or someone else's JIT if it were pluggable), through to
design ideas (how is it that JamVM is so compact? how does ovm do boot
image stitching? What did Shudo learn when building his JIT?), through
to mechanisms (how does JCVM do dynamic dispatch?). Some of this is
already appearing on the wiki.
My strong feeling is that as a community we have an extraordinary
advantage of a vast amount of great work from a variety of backgrounds
which we can freely integrate and build upon. I feel uncomfortable
talking too much about MMTk and Jikes RVM because I know that there is a
phenomonal amount of intersting work out there which we have not started
hearing about yet. If Harmony does not leverage this extraordinary
wealth of ideas, experience (and code), then it would be a missed
opportunity of great proportions.
I believe that there is an enormous amount we can start working on right
now, without feeling a need to start writing a core from stratch right
now, be it in Java or C. I hope that will emerge very soon.
Really, I think there's not a lot we disagree about.
Cheers,
--Steve
