[gclist] Sharing GC resources between applications

[David F. Bacon]

> I'm guessing that David would have no objection if I rewrote the end
> of this to say:
>
>   ...is a serious drawback today, when VM implementations have not yet
>   reached the same level of maturity and reliability as operating
>   systems.  In the long run, this approach essentially treats the VM
>   *as* the operating system.  A program that panics the OS reveals a
>   bug in the OS, not the program, no matter what the program did, and
>   in the same way a program that crashes a VM reveals a bug in the VM.
>   In the long run, the frequency of such bugs in VMs and OSs will
>   become the same, at which point this argument against the Isolate
>   approach no longer holds.

I object unless you outlaw JNI calls within any Isolate-containing JVM.  Or
you use something like software fault isolation
(http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=168619.168635) for all of the
native code -- which will be hard if you are running subsystems like
database managers.

> Reasonable people may, of course, differ on how long this will take :-)

I differ on how long this will take :-)

david