UVM Architectures

[Dwight Hughes]

| From: Bill House <bhouse@dazsi.com>
|
   [ much good stuff snipped ]
|
| Of course, one way to avoid the thornier issues is to consider each
language to
| be running on its own virtual VM, with the UVM being more of a VM factory
than
| an actual VM. Then, normal IPC (COM, CORBA, whatever) can take care of
calling
| semantics among virtual VMs, and we can ignore  questions like "how do I
return
| multiple values to a BASIC caller?"

One possible solution that has been discussed (don't remember who brought
it
up first) is making VMs first class objects in the LispOS - which I believe
is
a far better solution than trying to create a true UVM (not that it
shouldn't
represent the Holy Grail of VM-dom). The portable LispVM could be specified
with this also - a meta level system capability independent of any
particular
language's VM definition. This might be considered a meta-VM (MVM?) - the
specification of the environment the language specific VMs will be embedded
in,
including the inter-object communication layer(s).

-- Dwight