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When you said a VM that doesn't look like real hardware, I thought maybe something like WebAssembly! Maybe even that's too HW-y though? (stack, no registers, st
by miloignis 5y ago
When you said a VM that doesn't look like real hardware, I thought maybe something like WebAssembly! Maybe even that's too HW-y though? (stack, no registers, structured control flow, interaction with outside world only through function calls)
- megameter 5y agoMy current "VM" inspirations include...regular expressions, constraint logic, modular synthesizers, three-ring binders. You can go really, really far away from a computing system being a Turing machine with arithmetic, if you work at it - like, that's the thing you already have in every PL. But I think getting away from that also entails getting down and dirty with your chosen benchmark of expressiveness, and accepting that the system does not do some things well, and if you want to have multiple things coordinated, then you need to be careful about expressing that, too, to avoid just making a Turing tarpit.
- justanothersys 5y agoYeah this is exactly why I came up with whistlegraphs. I was doing a lot of thinking about how to define a VM for dynamic graphics and drawing and then realized I could start to specify things at a much higher level of abstraction before ever needing the computer. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXUUCkqv2LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXUUCkqv2LY)
- Doxin 5y agoWell that was a delightful video. Very whimsical.
- justanothersys 5y agowhy thank you
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoActually what I've been toying around with mentally has some similarities to web assembly, like only interacting with the outside world through function calls, but I personally feel webassembly suffers from a lot of design by committee.