Slate's slowness impeding UI/IDE development

[Brian Rice]

On Jun 13, 2006, at 10:04 PM, Timmy Douglas wrote:

> 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.

1) Tiny: Common Lisp images are huge - 3 Mb at the minimum. The Slate  
VM starts at 32kb if you build it minimally.
2) Simple: Implements only the PMD dispatch algorithm plus basic  
memory, control-flow, and operations.
3) Portable: We generate ANSI C (vm.c and vm.h) and specialize to  
POSIX/Win32/etc. as is suitable.

Also, it is the minimal way in which Slate system code could be  
written in Slate - self-hosting was a major plus for us, to get an  
idea of what the next stage problems would be in terms of using Slate  
for systems code. It also *is* faster than the Common Lisp interpreter.

>>> 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

Yeah, but at issue was the fact that he resisted email interchange of  
any kind - his replies only dampened further discussion. I wound up  
writing emails for him, most of the time.

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

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