The wealth of ideas that are coming to the table is impressive.
I suggest that we establish some sort of inventory of our "assets" (presumably on the wiki). I think that such a resource will be enormously helpful to a project like this one which is trying to bring together a huge pool of enthusiasm, prior work and outstanding research. If this project could produce a VM that literally combined the best of all of the work at the table, it would be a formidable VM indeed.
By "assets", I mean everything from the concrete (donated code), to the more abstract (resources such as papers like the one Andy posted to the list yesterday). I think that if we maintain this as we go along, it could prove to be a really valuable resource. To me this is our strength---so many different individuals bringing different expertise to the project, from code to ideas. If we can catalog that wealth and therefore have it at our collective fingertips, I think the chances of this project capitalizing on those ideas and doing really exciting things will increase greatly.
I can imagine a tree like structure, with leaves on the tree being assets, each one described briefly---if code, then the level of availability and license, and perhaps a summary with pointers to more info. If a paper, then a short summary and a pointer, etc etc etc. For example, I think all of the VMs we're aware of should be leaves of a VM node in the tree. The Boehm collector adn MMTk are obvious leaves of the VM.GC node. The paper Andy raised could be added to VM.interpreter. It may in fact be a graph, with, JamVM, for example getting a mention under VM.interpreter as well as VM and OVM could be under VM and VM.java-in-java, etc etc etc. In a relatively short period of time, this could become a great repository of the state of the art in VM design and implementation.
It may then be that the technical FAQ simply becomes a set of references to the inventory of ideas.
--Steve
