[virtmach] VMs in the "real" world?

[Stephen Pelc]

Ian Piumarta wrote:
> Now I'm curious to know just how widespread VMs (or any kind of
> runtime code generators) are in the "real" world.  Where do they
> crop up?  Who uses them?  Why?

The two major reasons are:
1) platform independence
2) Code density

Both of these are illustrated by the OTA (Open Terminal 
Architecture) system whose specifications are deep inside the 
smart card section at www.europay.com.

We have also put VMs inside mobile phones to reduce the size of 
the games.

One of our customers was distributing software updates to remote 
dataloggers over a 1200 baud modem. He had to distrubute 2Gb in 
total for each update. A VM would have saved him a lot of money 
and time.

> The "Inside VFX" paper is interesting and although there are
> no compilation times reported in it I'll bet this thing is
> *fast*. 
yes, the VFX code generator is fast and produces good code.

Stephen

--
Stephen Pelc, sfp@mpeltd.demon.co.uk
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 23 80 631441, fax: +44 23 80 339691
web: http://www.mpeltd.demon.co.uk - free VFX Forth downloads