Funny you should mention it
Incidentally, does anyone know of prior art for doing that kind
of jumping from VM to meta-interpreter and back, in Smalltalk or other
similar (OO, bytecode) systems? There's a company doing exactly that to
enable call/cc in Java, and I'm curious if their patent application has
any validity.
------
My first thought was that your question reminded me of indirect-threaded
Forth implementations, which is the classic style of Forth
implementation. In an indirect-threaded Forth, each "subroutine"
(called a "word" in Forth) begins with the address of its interpreter.
Also, consider the similar, but slightly different, direct-threaded
Forth implementation style where every "word" begins with machine code
which is the interpreter for that "word" (it is typically a jump or call
to the interpreter for that class of Forth "word").
Maybe that could be seen as prior art, without needing to squint too
hard? I suppose this goes back to the late 1960s or early 1970s. There
was a nice article in Byte (1980? or early 1980s) with a title something
like "Threaded Interpreters" which went into some detail about
indirect-threading, direct-threading, subroutine-threading, and
token-threading.
