[squeak-dev] The Trunk: Monticello-cmm.585.mcz

Colin Putney colin at wiresong.com
Wed Jan 29 17:17:50 UTC 2014


On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:


> It happens when a message is sent to the Proxy, so it can't be THAT
> unrelated.
>

The problem I ran into was triggered by cleaning out references to obsolete
behaviours. This is a low-level piece of the core system. It had nothing to
do with Monticello, and took several days of debugging, with help from
several people on the list to figure out what was going on.

The thing is, #become: is an exotic tool that should be kept near the
bottom of the tool chest, on the same shelf as thisContext and
dynamically-created classes. Yes, it's very powerful, but with that power
comes responsibility. If we use that tool in a ubiquitous part of the
system like Monticello, we're asking every Squeak developer to take on this
responsibility, even though they didn't pick up the tool themselves.

Here's another way to look at it: for the benefit they provide, proxies
come with a cost, in complexity and unpredictability. You don't notice it
much because you're paying that cost anyway, but most of us don't use
Magma--or anything similar--in our day to day work. For us, the incremental
cost of this change to Monticello is significant.

Colin
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