On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Huw Davies wrote:
I guess the only difference is that BCPL is
significantly smaller and
simpler. I doubt that I could move Java to a new environment within a week,
whereas I'd be confident that anyone with some simple programming skills
could move BCPL, even with the limited documentation that exists.
That's true, but it's also part of the reason that Sun defined several
levels of Java runtime. I haven't kept track of the latest haps, but last
I checked they had "personal" and "embedded" Java which basically
defined
subsets of the run-time environment that both facilitate porting effort
and minimize footprint.
But for something like a desktop environment to run pretty GUI simulators,
you'd want to port the GUI glue. You don't have that "problem" with
other
languages simply because they didn't define a GUI abstraction.
In any case, nailing down a common simulation runtime environment would
just be one of the hurdles. It'd also be nice to define, for example, a
software bus so that simulator writers could easily share CPU and
peripheral implementations. From experience, I can tell you that writing
a good 386 simulation, for example, is tough, and I wouldn't wish that
particular wheel-reinvention upon anybody I liked :-)
-- Doug