On May 25, 2005, at 11:04 PM, Steve Blackburn wrote:
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.
Clearly we are going to leverage whatever we can to get this done.
We do have a clean slate in our design - that we can take all that is
known about how to build a great VM, and from *that* start to decide
what to re-purpose or collaborate with.
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.
I hope not, because we're depending on you both :)
geir
Cheers,
--Steve
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
