I'm New Here

Andreas Raab Andreas.Raab at gmx.de
Sat Jul 21 22:50:46 UTC 2001


Frank wrote:
> It is difficult to argue with a manager today to use
> Smalltalk - Smalltalk has it's biggest advantages durin
> development time -  deployment is still weak.
>
> So the translation to solve the deployment problem is attractive.

Personally, I don't see any relation at all between translating Smalltalk
code and "solving" deployment issues.

> And also a problem with almost every Smalltalk if you use
> an image for deployment - it is decompilable - so you give
> potentially your sources away.

This argument surely doesn't hold. You can decompile everything (even your
translated code) and the only difference is that selectors, temps and
instance variables give you a pretty good idea what some class is going to
do. You could trivially replace those names that don't interact with your
environment (the API) and change them into something utterly unreadable. And
I want to see the person who can figure out how the balloon engine works if
I rename all the classes to "T1 ... T1000" the selectors to #t1: ... #t1000
and all instVars to t1 ... t1000 ;-) It would even be trivial to make it so
that the names are held in some external map which you can hook up to some
deployed image for debugging.

Cheers,
  - Andreas





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