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OOPSLA 1999 trip report, Tuesday |
On Tuesday morning, which came really early. I attended the VM workshop 'Simplicity, Performance and Portability in Virtual machine Design' which was quite well attended by anyone doing VM work, either in Smalltalk or Java. John Maloney was quite please with attendance and the quality of material presented. I'm sure in future this will been a very exciting part of OOPSLA
Things I thought were interesting, Jan Bottorff paper on 'The Argument Source Permutation (ASP) Virtural Machine Instruction Set', and Eliot Miranda's (of Cincom) paper on 'Context Management in Visualworks 5I'.
Ian Piumarta discussed his pseudo assembler 'ccg: a tool for writing dynamic code generators'. His objective was to create an assembler that was cross platform (Architectures like Sparc, PowerPC, Intel, and Arm come to mind}. This assembler uses macros that compile down to C code whose objective is to spit out hexadecimal data which is really the opcodes for the targeted CPU. This code is then executed by the JIT (Just in Time) VM.
My thoughts on the whole show:
(1) If you are a VM expert then Sun is hiring, Ian Piumarta is looking for a candidate for post doc work in France. Lastly Disney could be convinced to have you do an internship. The first play pays a lot, the others are more like destiny is calling.
(2) Sun seemed to have three VM projects on the go. Their current products lack the performance they want, thus new VMs are being created.
(3) It would seem the undertones I heard that day and from others at the conference was that the Java bytecode set was flawed. They would like to change them, but how?
After the workshop later in the evening more food. I ran across a fellow I know who works at a nameless (to protect the innocent) e-vendor. This vendor was in the agony of migrating from a fun unstructured company to a pin-striped serious player, well they are a serious player and perhaps the fun folks are cashing out. One of the things discussed was the scaling issue, perhaps instead of booking the last item in a category and bottlenecking that lock one should behave like the airlines and overbook? That of course would require a change to corporate culture and to customer viewpoints.
Tuesday night ended early, say midnight. However I did attend a few minutes of the IBM party and ran across Joseph Bacanskas. Joseph was explaining his work at his former company Mutual Travel then later took a group of us aside and showed us the system running on a linux laptop. Lots of people I talked to had a Linux system or two at home and the occasional one had Linux on their laptop, yes I'll migrate any day now. Joe's system was built to address a common problem: How to integrate a large number of small companies that have a common business domain and were bought by a larger holding company.
Smalltalk can do this without thinking, the Web helps of course. The system Joseph wrote uses VisualWave and GemStone to replace all the paper on standard operating procedures and announcements from head office, with dynamic web pages. By allowing dynamic construction tailored by subcompany we get a unique feel and by allowing employee to update and add to them, not quite by the Wiki principle, we capture information that was once inaccessible by others outside of the smaller subcompany. Very neatly done in a few months by the folks behind the curtain.