[plt-dev] Re: renaming programs in the distribution

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> I am not arguing for abandoning these separate tools. You're an
> old Unix man and I appreciate and I have learned to live with such
> grumpy old guys.

I'm not talking about Unix-style tools.  I'm talking about fancy gui
tools that the kids are into these days.

> But for youngsters like me, I think it would be
> neat if we had this additional tool so that I can run all these
> things from one common space, eliminating some space overhead
> from my machine. (It seems like no matter how much memory I buy,
> it's never enough.)

It seems like what you want is for multiple Racket programs to be able
to share the same VM process, thus sharing memory.  I think this would
be useful in some cases, and I think people have investigated it in
the context of Java.  But it also has some drawbacks.  For example, a
crash in one program brings down everything.  And SirMail and DrRacket
can't run on separate cores.  And both programs pause at the same time
for GC.

In general, the trend in VMs seems to be toward spawning more of them
quickly (that's what Chrome is doing, and Java has worked on this),
rather than sharing them more.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu