Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine

Re:Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine by maxime_cb on Saturday February 25, 2023 @06:54PM (#34941687)

I was thinking something like actors, or independent processes sending messages would be nice. Just because it's very safe and predictable. Less error-prone than threads.

The thing that kind of gets me is it seems difficult to have safe shared memory with actors? You ideally want to be able to share memory if you want things to be efficient, but if you have shared memory, then you get into issues with atomic writes and things being observed in different orders, etc.

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Re:Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine by samsquire on Sunday February 26, 2023 @02:48AM (#34943841)

I assume you would be communicating pointers with actor mailboxes, so the only copy is a pointer. I believe Erlang copies data itself into other actor's heaps, that simplifies garbage collection since GC can be done per process and there is only one owning reference to a processes' data.

You might find Pony's ORCA interesting which is how they implement garbage collection between actors.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/faculty-of...

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