Embedding VMs

[Marc Wachowitz]

Michael Korns <mkorns@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Any effort which is not Web
> enabled, or which excludes the Java supporters, etc. would not be of
> interest to my company.

The only way to extend the JVM is via imlementation defined attributes
(look what even Sun had to do for nested classes in Java 1.1), which
I'd consider a harmful approach for LispOS - it's just too much garbage
which would have to show up throughout the system.

On the other hand, if all you need is the ability to execute arbitrary
class files in JVM format, the user won't be able to tell whether LispOS
uses JVM for itself or just translates it (on load time or in advance).
Remember, a virtual machine is just _one_interface_, and tells _nothing_
about the way it's really implemented, or which other interfaces may
be supported by the implementation, any more than you could tell whether
some WWW browser was written in Pascal, C, Fortran, Prolog, APL, Lisp,
x86 assembly, or whatever else.

Can you tell us some _technical_ reason for using JVM anywhere else than
in a class loader for JVM code? If you merely want to do so for marketing
hype, I doubt you'll find much support for that around here. That approach
does just about everything wrong for a LispOS developed as free software
and intended to evolve.

-- Marc Wachowitz <mw@ipx2.rz.uni-mannheim.de>