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

On Apr 21, 2010, at 10:37 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:

> 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.

Our whole claim is that mred eh mrracket is an OS. We should
push it hard so that one error doesn't take down the whole thing.
And I think we can.

(I could even imagine a fake shell :-)


> 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.

We're not there. When we are, we can revisit.