Re: [Sablevm-user] Greetings!

[Brent F. <bfu...@de...>]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 05:48:40PM -0400, Etienne M. Gagnon wrote:
> SableVM is not yet able to run programs (as you may have discovered
> already), but it is quite close to it.  Mainly, what is missing is the
> native implementation of VM specific classes required by
> classpath/sablepath.  (System, Runtime, Thread, etc.)  Also, there are a
> few missing bytecodes (wide, multianewarray,...).  So, you may expect to
> be able to run simple benchmarks/toy programs soon.
> 
Understood.  I wonder if any of the comparable classes used in Japhar
or Kaffe could be used as a starting point...

> In the last 3 weeks, I wasn't working on the VM, because I had other
> research matters to attend to (like presenting a paper at SAS200, and
> doing some related work).  I am now working full time on the VM, so
> things should progress roundly.
> 
I know just what you're talking about.  I fully understand how outside
time constraints can minimize the time available for these projects.  

> Given the structure of the VM, it should be easy to extend the
> instruction set, if this is what you are looking for.
> 
Well, I located this project while trying to find information on
running Haskell and other functional language interpreters on top
of a Java VM.  You may be familiar with Kawa, which is a Scheme
implementation on a JVM (or JPython for that matter).

My requirements are:
* Open Source
* Efficient
* Embeddable.

The goal is to eventually (whew) build a sort of generic extensible
platform on top of some kind of VM architecture.  The "platform"
would be capable of running various interpreters for different
front-end languages (e.g., Scheme, Haskell, CAML, etc.).

This is obviously far in the future, but the idea came up while
talking with some people on the Guile list about how hard it might
be to do so.  (Since Guile is aimed at translating other scripting
languages [Tcl, Python, etc.] into Scheme for use in Guile).

I thought it might be better (performance-wise) to do things around
a virtual machine, rather than try to translate source-code on
the fly.  We'll see.

At any rate, I learned through my reading that certain functional
programming features (like closures) are hard to implement
efficiently on top of Java.  So, my question.

At any rate, I'm not much of a compiler hacker, but I do happen
to have a copy of the JVM book (O'Reilly's) now, so maybe I
can be of some help? ;-)

Thanks,

-Brent