Re: VSTa

On Mon, Apr 19, 1999 at 11:52:35AM +0000, Andy Valencia wrote:

> approach. For instance, www.squeak.org is a very powerful Smalltalk
> implementation which might make a nice starting point for all upper level
> functions. Imagine where the VSTa kernel runs the disks, ticks the clock,
> and so forth, and then Squeak powers all the upper level
> protocols--windowing, mail, UI, graphics, browser, web server, and so
> forth.

Sounds interesting. Maybe it's time I leart a new language. The only possible
danger with the above approach I can see is too tight a binding on the
implementation language (in this case Smalltalk) which would lead to a loss of
flexibility? You want to be able to reasonably easily support mainstream
languages like C/C++?

> Or perhaps there's a better approach. But in any case, I really doubt at
> this stage of the industry that there's much to be gained by trying to
> look enough like Linux that you can try and port Linux's applications onto
> Yet Another Free OS. Linux has that front covered, so my interest is in
> moving out into more speculative areas.

I never thought that VSTa should go in the direction of making it look like
Linux. Granted, POSIX would be good but not essential. The goals I had in mind
were to provide a light-weight OS that would scale down better than Linux.
This has been achieved to a large degree (notably missing hardware drivers).

I know I keep talking about doing some work on Linux driver support and then
never get around to it, but I was discussing this with some friends last week
and one suggestion made was that I could maybe wrangle a honors project out of
it, something along the lines of "code reuse". So I'll see how that goes. I
still have a year or so to go before I start thinking about that and things
can change in a year. Andy, what do you think?

> For the time being I would welcome help in maintaining the web pages. One
> benefit of tending our little campfire is that there are a number of
> educational institutions which use VSTa in OS courses now and then.

That is certainly a worthwhile project, there has been a lot of great work
done on VSTa and it would be nice to be able to point people to the web page
and say "this is what's been done, it's all there".

Just my 2c...

mato

-- 
Martin Lucina http://www.kotelna.sk/mato/ Wellington, New Zealand
I've always been mad I know I've been mad like the most of us are 
Pretty hard to explain why you're a madman even if you're not mad