To Traits Or Not To Traits (Was: Re: Stefs roadmap for 3.9, time to get it nailed down)

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Feb 24 17:26:06 UTC 2005


On 24 févr. 05, at 17:13, Ned Konz wrote:

> On Thursday 24 February 2005 7:15 am, Nathanael Schärli wrote:
>> If you are using no libraries that use traits, then traits have
>> absolutely no effect on you, except that there are a handful of
>> additional classes in the kernel (such as Trait, TraitDescription,
>> ClassTrait, etc.) that most people are not interested in anyway.
>
> There is one effect: your image is larger. For those of us wanting to 
> run
> embedded systems on memory-constrained devices, this can be an issue.

I do not know exactly, but with traits we remove duplicated code since 
the kernel
is bootstrapped. For example, a lot of functionalities are reuse 
between the new
classes and the existing one (classDescription and others).

Also collection could gain a be reduced (nathanael showed in the OOPSLA 
paper 12% of reuse)
but without rewriting everything so we could expect a bit more.

> How much larger does (the absolutely necessary, hard to load as a 
> package,
> kernel part of) Traits make an image?

I do not know we should measure it. Try to get the version oin squeak 
map and check it.

>  I'm assuming that the browsers and
> other tools could be packaged separately, right?

Sure.
>
>
Stef




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