Re: Thoughts and Opinions or something like that

[Andrew Cooke <andrew@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk>]

Things I'd like from a VM (off the top of my head - I don't use VMs
directly and I have no idea whether the following are possible):

- garbage collection
- support for coroutines (no single stack restrictions)
- support for tail recursion

(the last two are known problems with the JVM, I believe).

If you want to concentrate on your language, rather than writing the VM,
you could target an existing machine - apart from the obvious .net and
JVM, you might consider C--

Andrew

"chris.danx" wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>     Someone on these news groups suggested to someone that in order to make a
> reliable Virtual Machines, they needed the opinions of many programmers in many
> languages.  {Can't remember who, some of those threads get huge and i get lost!
> Good idea who ever it was!}
> 
> I'm involved in a project to develop a VM and i was looking for peoples thoughts
> on this.  I've started with a simple RISC machine that's not finished yet.  I
> will complete this soon, but i've been thinking my approach is flawed.  Not to
> say RISC is bad, but maybe it's too simplistic or lacks specific support for
> features that'd make it A:more efficient and B:easier to program.
> 
> The language project will support the following imperative features:
> 
> -    For/While loops
> -    Procedures
> -    side effect enabled programming (variables)
> -    "tidy" pointers
> -    modes for parameters (only for procedures, functions nonmodified params)
> -    Generitcity (polymorphism)
> 
> and the following functional features
> 
> -    pattern matching
> -    side effect free programming (values)
> -    higher order functions
> -    guards
> -    Algebraic types
> -    N-Tuples
> -    Genericity (polymorphisism)
> 
> and the following "not sure" or "in many paradigms" features
> 
> -    Units bound to values/variables
> -    Lists                         []
> -    Arrays                        <>
> -    Records
> -    Sets (and Records as Sets)    {}
> -    Enumeration types (with extensiblity and subtyping)
> -    Subtyping
> -    Relational programming (some paper i really liked described it, prologish
>      but somewhat different)
> 
> This list is quite exhaustive and i know it doesn't look that nice now, but the
> work i've done so far seems to indicate this is all possible and looks nice too.
> The major stumbling block is state->stateless programming but i'm looking and
> trying ideas out.  Something will be done; whether or not it's pretty is another
> matter.
> 
> I know many folks get annoyed when they here about "yet another new language"
> but this is not about the language itself.  It is about me learning about all
> this stuff and seeing what i can do with a big collection of (sometimes
> unrelated) issues and see what can come of it.
> 
> The real problem is the VM, so i'm looking for peoples thoughts on this.  What
> concepts would you have found useful, and what you'd rule out.
> 
> Please feel free to ignore this if you don't want to contribute (i know you will
> anyway).
> 
> Regards,
> Chris