I met an interesting character today. I have been acquainted with him for some time as he works at a Star Bucks here in town and gave me a beta copy of Mac OS 10.3 for kicks. Last
Sunday I saw him and a friend at Cafe Cubana programming, they left before I got a chance to inquire into their project. Apparently they have worked all summer on a project to implement their own Virtual Machine. Modeled loosely after a Java Virtual Machine with several major exceptions - Java runs as a Just In Time Compiler, while theirs is more of a translator. Their aim is interesting as well. They basically developed a meta language engine which can take as input a natively written program on one compiler set and knows how to translate its machine code into to a the native machine code of completely different architecture. They accomplish this by describing the architecture of the participating machines... no they haven't got Intel yet. They are working on SPARC, PPC, and another virtual machine which is popular in academia. Absolutely intriguing. All of this work is toward taking the
Siemens Westinghouse scholarship prize. Good luck,
Interesting Joe, good luck. I only wish I had the motivation or encouragement to do this before I passed my prime *grin*
