[virtmach] MS Common Language Runtime

[thaddaeus.frogley@creaturelabs.com]

>> 
>> I think the main reason that Microsoft don't want their IL
>> representation labelled as "bytecode" is marketing goals.  Microsoft
>> have been very studiously avoiding mentioning Java and in particular
>> avoiding comparing the MS CLR to the Java.  I guess you can draw your
>> own conclusions from that.
>
> I can understand MS's point of view.  I worked on the Dis VM that
> is part of the Inferno OS from Bell Labs.  Its "VM Instructions"
> were not considered bytecode because the instructions were encoded
> to be more then one byte (instructions were a byte, but the instructions
> had operands included in the stream).  So the term bytecode was not
> appropriate.  We just called it the Dis VM Instruction set. 

That's interesting, I've always thought of the instruction set for the VM
I've been working on*  as "bytecode", although they way its encoded an
instruction is always a 32bit word, with the first byte as an opcode, and
the other three as operands.

Thad
Software Engineer
CreatureLabs

*It doesn't have a fancy name, its just gets called "the VM", or
occasionally "the behaviourscript VM", buts that's another story...