Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Tim Rentsch
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: "C Is The Greenest Programming Language" by: Chris Lott
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2022 12:22:42 -0800
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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legalize+jeeves@mail.xmission.com (Richard) writes:
> Tim Rentsch spake the secret code
> <86v8zl29yr.fsf@linuxsc.com> thusly:
>
>> There was no operating system in the conventional sense of the
>> term. Garbage collection was part of the VM underlying the
>> OOP environment. Multitasking was done in and by the OOP
>> environment itself, with "stack frames" being objects, and so
>> could be queued for later resumption, switched between, etc.
>
> Smalltalk and LISP Machine environments are really quite different
> from what we assume computers are like today. [...]
Lisp machines are special purpose hardware. Smalltalk VMs
run on standard hardware, much like Java bytecode interpreters
do today. Also the memory mangement code runs inside the VM,
so it is very much line standard code running on conventional
hardware of today (after taking into account the more limited
memory space and 16-bit registers, etc). The key point is
that the system as a whole is very careful with how it uses
memory, unlike the earlier claim about OOP environments using
memory with wild abandon.