On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 8:02 AM Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote:
> > > On 17 Jan 2019, at 02:00, Martin McClure <mar...@hand2mouse.com> wrote: > > > > On 1/16/19 1:24 AM, Nicolas Cellier wrote: > >> IMO, windows VM (and plugins) should do the UCS2 -> UTF8 conversion > because the purpose of a VM is to provide an OS independant façade. > > > > I have not looked at this particular problem in detail, so I have no > opinion on whether the VM is the right place for this particular > functionality. > > > > However, I feel that in general trying to put everything that might be > OS-specific into the VM is not the best design. To me, the purpose of a > Smalltalk VM is to present an object-oriented abstraction of the underlying > machine. > > > > Thinking that way leads me to believe that the following are examples of > things that are good for a VM to do: > > > > * Memory is garbage-collected objects, not bytes. > > > > * Instructions are bytecodes, not underlying machine instructions. > > > > This works well to hide the differences between machine instruction > sets, memory access, and other low-level things. However, no Smalltalk > implementation that I know of has been able to use the VM to iron out all > differences between different OSes. > > > > I do believe that it is a good idea to have cleanly-designed layers of > the system, and that there should be an OS-independent layer and an > OS-dependent layer with clean separation. But I think it might be better to > put most of the OS-dependent layer in the image rather than in the VM. For > one thing, the image is easier to change if there is a bug, or a lacking > feature, or you're trying to support a new OS. > > > > And if it's in the image you get to do the programming in Smalltalk > rather than C or Slang, which is more fun for most of us. And, let's face > it, fun is an important metric in an open-source project -- things that are > fun are much more likely to get done. > > +100 > The VM *is* developed in Smalltalk https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328509577_Two_Decades_of_Smalltalk_VM_Development_Live_VM_Development_through_Simulation_Tools > > Regards, > > > > -Martin > > > > > > > -- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
