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[[User:Jecel|Jecel]] 22:24, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
== The environment ==
Every time I see this page I am very tempted to simply rip out the first paragraph of "The environment" section complaining about the problems of virtual machine based systems. Since this is a matter of opinion, however, I have so far left it as the original author wrote it.
The problem is that C programs that are stand-alone entities are possible but extremely rare. I have created such myself and this means no dynamic linking of any kind, not even an operating systems. Just your code, a few self contained libraries and the bare hardware. All other C programs depend on rather large and complex run time environments that make Self's virtual machine seem frugal in comparison. You can't take a .exe file and expect it to run on Linux, for example, unless you provide a replacement for the required environment using something like Wine.
The reason why Self's environment looks worse than what programmers are used to is that it is being nested on top of another environment - the operating system. On a computer where Self ran on the bare hardware users would think of applications in Self as very lightweight and stand-alone things. Programs written in C, on the other hand, would seem to need bloated and awkward support systems in order to run on such a machine. I go into more details about this in my ECOOP'95 paper [http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/jabs7.html] but the important thing is that the complaint about the virtual machine is valid for the particular situation we have today (Self on Unix-like operating systems) but not in general.
[[User:Jecel|Jecel]] 02:20, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
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