The VM Goals

[John Wood]

>>        Hi. The idea is to build a VM for LispOS. And to that extent
it must be specially optimized to handle LISP. It may be a mistake to
build a general VM, since it would be probably more difficult and Lisp
code would run slowly. <<

I believe that the aforementioned "optimisation" could be a feature of a good 
VM - and thus fit to model all languages efficiently.  I believe it's possible 
to have a VM which dynamically optimises depending on the program language 
architecture - eg. it may run with a different optimisation model for a Java 
program than that of a Prolog program - and in actual fact, you will have 
different optimisation "components" for different native processors and 
operating systems - depending on their capabilities.

But then again, these are just my comments (and ideas I have been working on 
for some time) - I will make them more concrete by backing the ideas up with a 
solid spec in the next week or so - and hopefully show you how we could come 
up with a VM which efficiently sported LISP as well as any other language, 
without any noticable overhead.

Thanks,

John