At 07:35 AM 2/7/02 -0500, Jim Hurd wrote:

>Why not just use hardware sandboxes? The cost of a cross process call is

less for most things than the cost of a software VM that can run everything
in-process.

>

If we were just talking about a cross process remote procedure call
all we would need to do is handle problems of invocation, authentication,
dispatch, and argument marshalling. Certainly doable, at least in
theory. But triggers and stored procedures need to call back into
the engine to do work, and that work must be part of the same transaction.
So add rendevous, deadlock detection, and reverse argument marshalling,
and the problems starts to look complex. My personal opinion is
undoable, but then I have little imagination.

Embedding a JVM, on the other hand, is straightforward and proven.
And I promise you that the cost in enter and leave a JVM is significantly
less that two context switches, particularily if the JVM implementation
lets you stay in the same thread.

Jim Starkey