search

Interlisp / medley

The main repo for the Medley Interlisp project. Wiki, Issues are here. Other repositories include maiko (the VM implementation) and Interlisp.github.io (web site sources)
https://Interlisp.org
MIT License
376 stars 19 forks source link

Alternative VM implementation based on C++, LuaJIT and Qt? #1846

Closed rochus-keller closed 1 month ago

rochus-keller commented 1 month ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Maiko apparently works, but the code shows its age and the diversity of authors and the technologies introduced over the years. And there has been a lot of progress in different areas since the code was written. There may come a time (or maybe it's already here) when training new people for work on Maiko, maintaining the code or migrating it to new systems could become more expensive than building a new VM.

Describe the solution you'd like In recent years, I have had good experiences with reusing LuaJIT and Qt as a platform-independent, reasonably fast backend for programming languages, and was able to use it to renovate several old systems and migrate them to current platforms.

I wonder if combining these technologies would not also be a good alternative solution for an Interlisp VM. The build and dependencies could be significantly simplified, and as a side effect, higher performance could be expected.

At the moment, I can't yet assess the feasibility and the effort for this very well, nor can I say how great the demand for such a solution is. But I think it would be an interesting project and I would be happy to invest some time in it. The question is whether there is a specification for the bytecode and the other functions expected by the VM clients (i.e. Interlisp code), or whether one has to find out everything oneself through reverse engineering.

Describe alternatives you've considered Maintaining the original VM would not be affected. Ideally, one could simply replace the executables. Graal/Truffle would certainly be an interesting alternative technology, but it's not my area.

Additional context Some of my projects where such a solution was applied: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk, https://github.com/rochus-keller/SOM, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon.

masinter commented 1 month ago

My temptation is to move this to a "discusssion" as a knd of research project that isn't immediately "actionable".
THere are some interesting ideas here but not really an actionable plan. And someone would have to take this up as a research project.