The Form of the Squeak Release [LONGISH]
R. A. Harmon
harmonra at webname.com
Sat Jul 17 15:44:07 UTC 1999
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
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