Keeping up with the GNUses

Just wanted to mention that for keeping up with GNU/Linux progress, the following two sources are very good:

• Michael Kerrisk's Linux man-pages
• Nick Clifton's GNU Toolchain Updates

Split stacks!

This could be big - in the October 2010 GNU Toolchain Update (subscribe!), Nick Clifton reports that split stacks have been added to GCC. With split stacks, thread stacks can grow (and shrink (?)) automatically.

It's a VM world, or is it?

Over on Charles Nutter's blog, after Charles has listed a number of shortcomings of the JVM for dynlang implementation, a commenter writes "Either way, it's a VM world".

I used to think that too. Today I see it differently. Yes it's a VM world, but the OS is the VM.

OSes have failed to provide isolation. Thus, today we virtualize them.

In the future, many apps will be distributed as a preconfigured OS image, and some even as preconfigured hardware appliances. In this world, saying that it's a VM world and meaning the JVM doesn't make sense. Who cares what runs inside your virtualized OS?

And let's face it: many apps are written in multiple languages. Insisting that they must all run in the Gosling Tarpit is silly. You lose flexibility. Furthermore, as OSes get more interesting features (think Linux' splice(2)), being separated from the OS by another layer means that you'll have to punch through that layer increasingly.

Yes, it's a VM world, but the VM doesn't have be a language VM.