> On 17 Jan 2019, at 02:00, Martin McClure <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 1/16/19 1:24 AM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
>> IMO, windows VM (and plugins) should do the UCS2 -> UTF8 conversion because
>> the purpose of a VM is to provide an OS independant façade.
>
> I have not looked at this particular problem in detail, so I have no opinion
> on whether the VM is the right place for this particular functionality.
>
> However, I feel that in general trying to put everything that might be
> OS-specific into the VM is not the best design. To me, the purpose of a
> Smalltalk VM is to present an object-oriented abstraction of the underlying
> machine.
>
> Thinking that way leads me to believe that the following are examples of
> things that are good for a VM to do:
>
> * Memory is garbage-collected objects, not bytes.
>
> * Instructions are bytecodes, not underlying machine instructions.
>
> This works well to hide the differences between machine instruction sets,
> memory access, and other low-level things. However, no Smalltalk
> implementation that I know of has been able to use the VM to iron out all
> differences between different OSes.
>
> I do believe that it is a good idea to have cleanly-designed layers of the
> system, and that there should be an OS-independent layer and an OS-dependent
> layer with clean separation. But I think it might be better to put most of
> the OS-dependent layer in the image rather than in the VM. For one thing, the
> image is easier to change if there is a bug, or a lacking feature, or you're
> trying to support a new OS.
>
> And if it's in the image you get to do the programming in Smalltalk rather
> than C or Slang, which is more fun for most of us. And, let's face it, fun is
> an important metric in an open-source project -- things that are fun are much
> more likely to get done.
+100
> Regards,
>
> -Martin
>
>
