Hi, On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 05:52 -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: > What do you have to negotiate? We want to define an interface for > the VM and Class library that is 100% usable by anyone and everyone. > I always imagined that we'd define the interface, and then each do an > independent implementation.
This is probably where we just don't agree on how to do a design, interface and framework on the VM/Platform-level. At this low level you cannot just define some interface. It isn't about defining something that makes programming against nice and beautiful for the programmer (although that is certainly a big plus!). It is about making minimal assumptions and showing actual implementations are possible without too high performance impacts. All problems can be solved by an extra interface indirection, but at a certain point each extra indirection costs you and you don't want to introduce them if not absolutely needed. So you need to design against actual implementations. Besides that we do have interfaces already for lots of components, class libraries, runtimes, platforms for the 20 or so runtimes, compilers and tools around GNU Classpath. It isn't a really compelling story for me to go back to these people and show them the new interfaces they will have to implement. And then tell them they cannot use any of the actual code from the "harmony" project since almost all of them are incompatible with the default license they use. I want them to participate in this design process and pick up the bits and pieces we create to show they actually are sane and can be used before we cast some magical interface into stone. Cheers, Mark
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