Introducing Huemul

[Sebastian Sastre]

> > Otherwise people will easily be demotivated and efforts 
> become quickly diluted.
> 
> Yes, sometimes you need to stop the car, because changing the 
> tires while driving is impossible. Currently to write a 
> plugin i need to use slate, then compile it , stop the car 
> (VM) and finally start using it.
> With new architecture, which i propose you don't need to stop 
> VM in most cases and you having instant results. So, who 
> stops the car? ;)
> 
> And if you talking about that i want to replace a slate, then 
> i agree, every custom plugin written in slate must be 
> rewritten. But who will argue about stopping the car, when 
> tires you changing will give you more speed and maneurability?
> 
> Also, don't forget that in spite of С compilers having heavy 
> optimizing algorithms , they still have limitations which you 
> can't avoid, because of language itself. For instance - you 
> can't check the integer overflow in C while summing two 
> integers. Can't construct a function calls based on 
> previously unknown type info, and have no dynamic type system.
> 
Yes, and, as I told you before I agree. But this does not give us more
certainty of a way to do it in practice sustainably. The 'running car'
metaphore was meant to be read also meaning that one are producting with a
smalltalk besides developing with it. So, one should stop the car only if
the costs of stopping are not too high. If one will have to stop several
short (cheap) times probably will be no big deal. But what happen when you
have a year of a non producting system? That could easily become inaceptable
and you should provide alternatives. This is why people other than
enthusiasts are still using Squeak with no optimizations at all but
producing real value while others invest it's time in exploring new and
experimental ways meant to be better ones of making Squeak to run, the
future of Squeak.

Anyway.. I really like to see a piece of software like you described to be
materialized,

Cheers,

Sebastian