I am reluctant to build my own virtual machine. Like other members, I am more interested in taking apart a virtual machine to see what makes it "tick". As a hobby, I might like to optimize a few vm-related components. I am thinking of a virtual machine more and more as a kit. There is an OSKit to build an OS. Why can't we develop a VMKit to build a virtual machine? At first, a system is built from the bottom up. It is easier to generalize once a virtual machine has been constructed. For now, we can use decaf as a baseline. All other virtual machines will be measured against it. Faster than decaf? Smaller than decaf? More flexible than decaf? A few components of decaf can be re-worked to start a VMKit. Others are decaf-specific. Here is another example. The interface between the standard Java class library and a virtual machine depends more on the standard Java class library than a virtual machine, right? So why can't we abstract this interface? We can. We can define all of the components and their methods a virtual machine must implement in order to support the following versions of Java: Java 0 Java 1 Java 2 The baseline should be stub components. A stub component implements an interface but does none of the real work. This is the basic idea behind BCNI and Alt package proposal. It is possible for a virtual machine to plug in a file system component, a network component, an AWT component. Each virtual machine does not have to write a unique implementation of AWT. We can work together. For example, some of the AWT for Linux has been written by the classpath Project (http://www.classpath.org). If it were better organized as a vm component, we could simply plug it into decaf in host mode. My kernel/virtual machine is called "CjOS" partly because it emphasizes the standard C library as its kernel interface. It uses a mix of C/C++ and Jasmin. It depends upon bytecode resource and Pure Reflection in C++. _______________________________________________ Kernel maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://jos.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel
