Walter did yo realy go Ohhhh?

Georg Wrede georg at nospam.org
Thu Jun 19 04:14:54 PDT 2008


Bill Baxter wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> PatrickD wrote:
>>
>>> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.html
>>
>> I've read a number of his previous rants, and I've generally found 
>> them interesting, informative, and thought provoking. Sometimes even 
>> entertaining. This one was an exception.
>>
>>> <Steve Yegge> He told me the other day, [talking about] one of my
>>> blog rants, that he didn't agree with the point that I'd made that
>>> virtual machines are "obvious". You know? I mean, of course you use a
>>> virtual machine!
>>>
>>> But he's a compiler dude, and he says they're a sham, they're a
>>> farce, "I don't get it!" And so I explained it [my viewpoint] to him,
>>> and he went: Ohhhhhhh. </Steve Yegge>
>>
>> The above story, and the fact that he goes on ranting irrespective of 
>> the slide sequence, the fact that he blatantly generalizes, derides, 
>> self-promotes, the fact that the transcript includes the superfluous 
>> interjections from spoken language, that he cavalierly exaggerates, 
>> and some other details -- collectively lead me to think he's, ehhh, in 
>> an "accelerated state of mind".
> 
> My guess is he's more accustomed to writing blogs than presenting them 
> as talks.  So he was probably just a little hyped up on stage fright.

Let's hope it. (OT: it took me more than the promised 20 minutes to read 
the stuff. Very much more. I guess I'm a slow reader.) :-)

> I think he makes some very good points in that talk, and they mostly make 
> sense if you start with the premise that all software can and should be 
> delivered over the web.  He's working for Google, and before that at 
> Amazon, so it's not surprising that his world view is skewed in that 
> web-centric direction.
> 
> So I think he's just forgetting (or deliberately ignoring) the fact that 
> someone still has to write that VM and the operating system it runs on, 
> and those better run as fast as possible or no one will care how 
> wonderfully "dynamic" it is.

Considering that all the languages he talks about still have to be 
/compiled/ for the VM (JIT or no JIT), I have a hard time seeing the 
case for VMs being rock-solid and compelling.

Think about it. If I have a web site where I let viewers run their own 
code on my server, I could simply provide them with a rigged D compiler. 
The compiler would (or a preprocessor, it would actually be easier for 
me) flag no-nos in their source code as errors. No biggie.

Or I might sandbox the running user binaries.

Of course I'd should also enforce per user quotas (or per user code 
snippet), and such. They could even write to the hard disk, and an easy 
way would be to have a virtual filesystem in a file.

---

And then there's the choice nobody seems to suggest: running a VM that 
uses the processor's own ASM as the VM language. The (e.g. D) compiler 
would enforce the exclusion of dangerous idioms.

Sure, this is more work than I'd personally care to do, but for some big 
company this should be a reasonable alternative.

---

Hmm. On second thought, there /is/ one case for the VM. And that is, the 
choice of languages. The bunch of languages he is talking about, I 
guess, are more suited for this kind of "user-tinkering" than "Real 
Languages", like D. At least some of them are somewhat usable with 
hardly any programming experience.

But that's definitely a language choice issue, and not a VM/no VM issue 
in itself.



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