Self 4,1 for MacOs?

Stefan Rieken StefanRieken at SoftHome.net
Thu Nov 4 18:48:51 UTC 1999


Jan Theodore Galkowski -and others- wrote -something like:

> Stefan,
> 
> For those of us not familiar with this New
> Way of the Sun, can you recap for us?
> 

:-) I thought this should be no news anymore in Object Paradise. Well, I
have been searching for free versions of Smalltalk to try out. I came
upon Self (which is not really Smalltalk) from Sun, but it only was for
Solaris (and now for Mac, too).

The people from Sun said that they found out some new system of
describing objects, and they said that it was better than object classes
because it was more general to use. They said this was proven, because
they implemented a Smalltalk *within* Self. Also they said to be twice
as fast as any Smalltalk-80 system.

See: http://self.sunlabs.com ; their homepage.

I am trying to find out where I have read this New Way thingy ;-), but
the info seems a little bit diffused here. Here's a beauty:

http://self.sunlabs.com/papers/implementation.html

I'll quote the most important part:

"Our SELF implementation runs twice as fast as the fastest Smalltalk
implementation, despite SELF's lack of classes and explicit variables. 

To compensate for the absence of classes, our system uses
implementation-level maps to transparently group objects cloned from the
same prototype, providing data type information and eliminating the
apparent space overhead for prototype-based systems."

I don't get *very* much wiser of this, but they do seem to say that they
have re-invented the wheel... So if anybody can translate this in Plain
Understandable English for me, I'd be glad.

Greets,

Stefan





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