Fanciful Magic

More thoughts on VMs

I read Richard Demer's comments on VMs and now, this whole idea of a universal VM has got me thinking. My thoughts are that I think current VMs are too static. Why couldn't we make features loadable via shared libraries? Want to have more byte codes? Plug in a new "feature" into the VM and your new byte codes work. Want to support type safety? Plug that in too. Now, I would recon that some features might actually clash with others, but then, we could partition our VM so that multiple languages could run in the same space. Binding features at runtime to VMs sounds like a cool idea for research...Maybe I should chalk this up to YAPTD (yet, another project to do)? Anyway, it would be fun to play with, I must admit....=) I wish I was going to Lightweight Languages this year and discuss this with the folks there. Some extremely bright folks out there!