Reducing VM size

So, I had a wild thought yesterday:

Exposing the host language in the source language, without having the source language act as a compiler to translate its code into the host language. I.e., for instance, Io interpreter written in C, exposes C to the runtime, but doesn't require a step of converting the Io code into raw C code, and compiling that down to a binary, linking against the runtime.

I thought it might be possible to embed a C interpreter with access to the calling programs memory space (lets forget about OS technical challenges involved with that last requirement for a moment).

This would allow us to cut things out of the core, implement the rest of the system at runtime in C (presumably tied into the JIT to compile it all down), really reduce the core out to almost nothing.

My justification for an approach like this is to keep the size of the Acute VM down to really nothing. Just the core object model, and then at a higher level, figure out other ways to reduce the complexity of the VM.

Thoughts?



Regards,

Jeremy Tregunna