a virtual machine

[Michael Korns]

Scott,

This is a very good start for any Lisp VM discussion. It has the advantage
that several compilers have been built on top of it. This gives it a wide
potential appeal.

I believe the LispOS community should start with something like this.
Extend it to subsume the Java VM. Extend it to translate to native binary
efficiently. Keep it simple. Write an easy to read standards document, and
go for it. Create a new, larger commercial market place on the Web.

Michael Korns

----------
> From: S. Musman <musman@airborne.nrl.navy.mil>
> To: coleman@math.gatech.edu
> Cc: lispos@math.gatech.edu
> Subject: Re: a virtual machine
> Date: Friday, April 25, 1997 8:09 PM
> 
> 
> >Does anyone have any references or links to documentation about
> >a virtual machine that might be suitable?
> 
> I replied personally to Bill House, because I thought the discussion
> had sortof gone beyond this issue, but a place to start might be to
> take a look at the POPLOG virtual machine. It currently has Common
> Lisp, Prolog, ML and POP-11 built on top of it. I've also heard of
> accademic implementations of Scheme and C that sit atop it. It's
> designed for flexibility rather than speed, and because it's rather
> old (developed originally in the 70's) it is rather CISC in nature
> (which is good for a VM) and not really designed to support data-typed
> languages with efficiency (e.g. the POPLOG implementation of CL
> pretty much ignores compiler directives regarding data types).
> 
> Anyway, the server was down the last time I checked, but if you check
> out:
> 
> http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianh/poplog.html
> 
> I'm pretty sure I remember a pointer to papers and information about
> the POPLOG VM.
> 
> I'm not advocating this specifically, but it is a source of valuabale
> information regarding a VM that is flexible. The VM for CLISP has
> many features to it's credit also.
> 
> 				-- Scott
> 
> -- 
> 
>                                  Scott Musman
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