At 11:49 PM 7/15/99 +0200, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:
[snip]
>A large monolithic image has IMHO another drawback which wasn't mentioned
>yet. Because it's so comfortable, people don't thing about what
>dependencies the subscribe to when adding code and you'll get a mess of
>inter-dependend code which can't really separated.  This adds a lot of
>unneeded difficulty to stripping.
>
>IMHO, simply following the 80-20 rule and removing 80% of the code
>(probably the classes of certain categories) isn't good enough.  I want to
>get rid of all 100% of code, especially of all this extensions to classes
>like Object.

Right.  It seems to me that a "Declarative Model" is a much easier approach.
Rather than trying to figure out what and how to strip out what you don't
want, just specify what you do want.


[snip]
>Please consider this.  Eventually, I'd like to see a system like SELF,
>which could bootstrap itself from literally nothing.  Okay, the inital
>class and object framework of Smalltalk is more difficult and complex than
>that of SELF, but I could imaging a fairly small core image which could
>nothing more than readin more modules.  Then, the first modules should
>contain the very basic classes like Boolean, Number, etc.  I'd imagine
>something like <100k.

Yes.  This sounds a lot like the "micro-kernel" idea I read a couple of
articles about (even understood part of it).  Didn't Next or NextStep, or
Next something use this approach?  I think the micro-kernel handled
processes, memory, and message passing, and everything else was plug-able.

--
Richard A. Harmon          "The only good zombie is a dead zombie"
harmonra at webname.com           E. G. McCarthy