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I thought that this was going to be about ASDF (Another System Definition Facility; a module manager for Common Lisp): https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/

Turns out that it’s a version manager (now there’s another overloading: ‘VM’ to mean ‘version manager’ vice ‘virtual machine’): https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf



VM means:

* virtual machine

* virtual memory

* version manager

Amusingly:

* virtual machine is itself overloaded (do you mean OS vm or language runtime vm)

* virtual memory is itself overloaded (do you mean mapping one address space to another via MMU for process isolation or using a swapfile to have more "memory" than ram)

I propose we start calling vcs/scm programs "version managers" so we can make this overloading fully recursive! (that is it would make this the 3rd bullet: do you mean switching between version of programming enviornment or keeping track of source code history?)


..and this is why we use descriptive variable names instead of initials.


> virtual machine is itself overloaded (do you mean OS vm or language runtime vm)

there's further different types of virtual "machines". they used to be called "type 1" and "type 2",

* type 1: runs on bare metal with no OS below it (Xen, HyperV, ESXi, ... vsphere?, others)

* type 2: runs on top of an OS (qemu, virtualbox, vmware workstation, others)

kvm is I guess kind of a mix? You need to use the userspace tools to manage it so it's like qemu (type 2) but the kernel exposes lots of things directly to the guest OS/image (type 1-ish).


And in some corners: Vuln Management.

I was initially so confused when I started at a security software company, because of this.


> virtual machine is itself overloaded

Not really, all modern OS's are C virtual machines.


i suppose any mature craft will end up with overloaded terms


I tought it was Advanced Science Data Format :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u23loMy3wrE&list=PLYx7XA2nY5...



ASDF is also just below QWERTY


I actually asked last year if it meant anything

https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/883


I was expecting it to be about the "lol so random" series of video skits and segued from there into hoping it was some kind of machine learning architecture for playing QWOP.




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