Re: What will many cores mean to future Windows releases?

"Paul Nichols [TeamB]" wrote

The only time a VM is necessary, is when you are writing to different OS
and hardware, IMHO.

Hard ware could be different than you're writing to for more than one
reason, though.

Obviously the hardware might be indeterminant (any of several different CPU
architectures underneath)--that would be the normal 'cross-platform' use
case.

Or the hardware might be indeterminant in a totally different sense: more
like the way a view in a database abstracts away from the underlying table
schema. That use doesn't imply cross platform at all.

If a VM provides a 'virtual' CPU that one writes to regardless of the actual
number of cores underneath, and the VM infrastructure then distributes jobs
and orchestrates those cores effectively without the programmer needing to
worry about all the details of these asynchonous processes, then that would
seem to be very worthwhile. Even though it has nothing to do with being
cross platform in the traditional sense.

I certainly do not see why a VM is necessary for a single hardware
platform and OS. To me, this makes no sense
whatsoever.

Take the above as one possible rationale. A VM might be useful for the same
reason that a high level language is useful--hiding underlying
details.Anders H. has talked about moving programming languages to the point
where the programmer just indicates he wants something sorted and what the
ordering criterion is. The run time then chooses the algorithm and number of
processors to devote to the task, so it's rather like an SQL 'ORDER BY'
clause--the programmer specifies what the results need to look like, and the
implementation details--being fairly mechanical once the business logic is
understood--are handled by the compiler and runtime.

bobD


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ADK/HLA v2.0 Update
    ... >Writing an assembler will let the programmer insert the ... >Writing an assembler allows the author to design a syntax ... I've programmed in assembler on many hardware platforms, ...
    (comp.lang.asm.x86)
  • Re: What will many cores mean to future Windows releases?
    ... Obviously the hardware might be indeterminant --that would be the normal 'cross-platform' use case. ... But I would rather see an inline operation or compiler switches that would allow you to set or monitor the operations without a JIT compile each time the process ran. ... VMs have their purposes, but optimization is better determined at coding time when you know where the code is going to be deployed, rather than leaving it to be determined at runtime. ... The run time then chooses the algorithm and number of processors to devote to the task, so it's rather like an SQL 'ORDER BY' clause--the programmer specifies what the results need to look like, and the implementation details--being fairly mechanical once the business logic is understood--are handled by the compiler and runtime. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: MacSoup + MBP - numeric keypad = irritation!
    ... every other programmer) means when he says hard-coded. ... not without recompiling the code. ... I'm just explaining what hard-coding means. ... in hardware purely because it's software, ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: What do you take for secure programming?
    ... Neverthless there plenty of them very confident on the result ... I am writing them alone, ... >> Important to know these books is all about about programming, ... > and even having to deal with hardware errors... ...
    (SecProg)
  • Re: normalization of pointers...
    ... but one very closely tied to the hardware. ... I used to do SW which was controlling test equipment and vastly more time was spent writing code to control the equipment and analyse the results than on doing the display, this back in the days before having a GUI was common when we still has to display graphs. ...
    (comp.lang.c)