Slate's slowness impeding UI/IDE development

[Timmy Douglas]

Brian Rice <water at tunes.org> writes:

> On Jun 11, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Mark Haniford wrote:
>
>> But wasn't Lee the only person working on the VM anyway?
>
> Lee actually didn't originally like the idea of using a VM. I simply  
> introduced a (buggy) Slate-to-C translator a la Squeak and sketched  
> out a VM design just to get the ball rolling when we were stuck in a  
> Common Lisp interpreter. If we hadn't done that, we'd still be there  
> on CL since he never completed his compiler.

Was the reason behind making a VM because it's easier to make? I'm not
really up-to-date with the good-sides of VMs other than portability
and maybe simplicity, but it's probably too late to argue one way or
another with that.


>> Were other people trying to bogart in on the VM or were their
>> arguments about the design or what?
>
> Towards the end there was a decent amount of clamoring for
> continuation support, which he apparently found unwarranted. He
> basically silently refused to code any support for it, while making
> hand-waving explanations about how easy it would be to get a subset
> of the functionality. At least a few people disagreed with him on
> the matter.

Well, I took a look at "Continuations, concurrency, yada yada..."  It
seems like he was looking for a good idiom for continuations to
represent. I can't really argue for them though since I've never
really used them (the call/cc type at least). oh well