On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:


> But, obviously you know about ODBMS's, so probably this isn't the
> answer you're looking for.
>

Well, it's the start of an answer. Sure, I know about ODBMSs, they're one
solution to this problem. I can copy my data structure (objects, in the
case of Squeak/Magma) to the database, then read it back later. But how
does that actually work?

Since the database is running in a separate process, you have to serialize
the objects somehow, and transmit them somehow, and when they're read back
into a different image, you have to detect and accommodate missing classes
and shape changes and so on. I'm sure you've implemented all this in a way
that's sensible for the intended uses of Magma. If we compare your solution
to say, Gemstone, I'm sure you can talk about this feature or that tradeoff
that's different between the two implementations. My question is, despite
those differences, are the two solutions essentially the same, or are the
differences fundamental? How about if we compare with Croquet? Or CORBA? Or
JSON?

I'm hoping this is something that people study, like oh, graph theory or
category theory or parsing.

Thanks!
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