Dolphin and Squeak

I've just read a post on the Squeak list which reminded me of something
that's been rattling around in my head for a while now.  The post was on the
Mac OS X (Cocoa) port of Squeak- the VM has been/is in the process of being
wrapped in an Objective-C wrapper so that it is available to be integrated
intoother Cocoa apps.

Wouldn't it be neat if there were a special Dolphin VM which included a
Squeak VM and a bridge between the two systems, so that you could easily use
Squeak resources from Dolphin and vice versa?   You would be able to take
advantage of all of the nifty stuff that is happening in Squeak without any
porting whatsoever (and vice-versa).  And, since you're talking VM-to-VM on
the same machine, you shouldn't have too many headaches from the
what-if-the-network-goofs-up problems that remote objects bring with them.

I guess there are lots of ways you could go about doing this, but... does
anyone else out there think this would be nice?  Useful?  Silly?

Jerry Bell
[hidden email]

Jerry Bell

> Wouldn't it be neat if there were a special Dolphin VM which included
a
> Squeak VM and a bridge between the two systems, so that you could
easily use
> Squeak resources from Dolphin and vice versa?

A potential problem which occurred to me when considering wrapping the
JNI interfaces for access via Dolphin:

How do you deal with garbage collection ?  E.g. you have a loop where
the last real ref to a Dolphin object is held by a Squeak object, and
the last real ref to the Squeak object is held by the Dolphin object.  I
haven't been able to come up with any scheme which would allow these to
be collected.

    -- chris