Walter did yo realy go Ohhhh?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Robert Fraser" <fraserofthenight at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:g346g3$ou7$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> But then, the whole idea of VMs being better for language interop is 
>> preposterous anyway. After all, how do VMs work? You take a 
>> high-level-language, compile it down to a sequence of pre-defined binary 
>> opcodes, and execute. Hey! Just like a real CPU! So if you can solve 
>> language interop on a VM, you can do the same thing to solve it for 
>> native code.
>
> By that argument, anything that a VM can do, native code should be able to 
> do. This is kind of true, but to get some of those things (i.e. 
> hot-swapping, security management, selective dynamic loading) working, you 
> almost need to implement a mini-VM.

True, but I guess what I was trying to say was "How do VMs work from the 
perspective of language interop?" From the security perspective, for 
instance, there are differences (With a VM, you can sanbox whatever you 
want, however you want, without requiring a physical CPU that supports the 
appropriate security features.) But for language interop it all just comes 
down to "standard ABI" regardless of whether it's a VM's machine code or a 
real CPU's machine code.