VM to support an OO language

Hello there,
        Our company is working on a project, part of which is a 4GL with
object oriented extensions. For various reasons we have decided to
translate the 4GL to a VM code and have a VM interpreter which executes
this code.


        We would like the VM code itself to have some form of support for
the OOness of the 4GL to ease translation and speed up execution.


        At the moment our problems include:


- The content/structure of the VM code to support our OO
extensions as naturally as possible.


- An internal representation of the inheritance hierarchy that
naturally supports multiple inheritance.


- The 4GL supports dynamic binding which means that we will
need to pass the above representation to the VM and have a
fast way of interrogating it at runtime.


- We wish to support incremental compilation, which will
complicate multiple inheritance.


        We were hoping that someone has looked at these problems before
and can either give us some rundown of their experiences, or point us
towards some useful references.


ADVthanksANCE


Paul


Phone: +64 9 419 0046 (in a rush)
Email: paulr@manasys.co.nz (if you're patient)
Snail: Mana Systems (if you're *really* patient)
              P.O. Box 34137, Auckland 10, NZ
[Smalltalk uses a bytecode interpreter, described in one of the books by
Goldberg et al. -John]
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