[Seaside] session reference

[Avi Bryant]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Stephen Pair wrote:

> I think that you need to make a decision on that front sooner rather
> than later as it will affect many decisions that you'll make.
> Portability to other dialects is nice, but there are also many benefits
> in being more intimately tied to the Squeak platform.  Not only do you
> need to decide whether or not to be portable, but also how you will
> achieve portability...here are two extremes:
>
> A) Do what SUnit did: build an entire portability layer
> B) Do what I did with Kats: I didn't do any work to make it portable and
> took the approach that I'd port it when someone was willing to pay me to
> port it...which I did.  The VisualAge port of Kats ended up being almost
> trivial even though I never designed Kats with portability in mind.

Yeah.  I'm definitely on the B) side - I'm not interested in cluttering
the code with a portability layer, and my experience is similar to yours -
porting from one dialect to the next is usually just busywork.

However, there are some things that are huge red flags for portability:
call/cc means Seaside will never run on VA or ST/X (oh well).  Needing a
custom compiler would rule out Dolphin.  Needing Runtime Environments may
well rule out something else.  Without getting overly obsessive about
portability, I can still try not to make life too impossible for potential
porters.

Nobody commented on the possibility of using an explicit state dictionary
for components, instead of compiler tricks.  No opinions?