Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: VM needed for rapid startup
Message-ID: <1030@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 27 May 88 07:25:02 GMT
References: <463@cvaxa.sussex.ac.uk> <19322@beta.UUCP> <5492@ico.ISC.COM>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 19
Posted: Fri May 27 00:25:02 1988

I think it's worth introducing some clarification here.
It's a pretty safe bet that Aaron Sloman had in mind programs like PopLog.
This is an integrated "AI programming environment" containing Pop-11,
Lisp (though why anyone would want Lisp when Pop is available ...),
Prolog, and now, I believe, ML.  Plus an extremely powerful editor called
VED (VED is exceptional these days in owing nothing to Emacs).  And then
there is a very large library...  To maximise the amount of shareable
code, it would be nice to produce a "fully configured" image, but that
could contain *many* megabytes of code.  A typical program run once might
touch only a megabyte (it might not, for example, use Lisp, though it
probably would use VED).  A *small* thump as chunks page in is ok, a
*long* wait while the whole thing crawls in would not be.

I imagine that packages like "S" are much the same: there is a very great
deal of code which should ideally always "be there", but any one session
is unlikely to use much of it.

"Shared libraries" in SunOS 4.0 are *almost* what (classical) segmented
machines provide, only clumsier, and they're relevant to this too.