Proposal for Extensible Primitives (was: FFI)

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Wed Aug 16 08:50:57 UTC 2006


Guys!!!
would not be possible to have a plan for a smooth transition even  
with the two approaches happily living side by side?

Stef

On 16 août 06, at 09:41, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Lukas Renggli wrote:
>>> Let's repeat the last part: "while explicitly preserving its  
>>> meaning or
>>> behavior". Not to break things. I'm perfectly cool with that.
>> Unfortunately my suggestion is no refactoring from your point of  
>> view,
>> it breaks backward compatibility.
>
> It's not "from my point of view", but rather "by definition" of  
> what refactoring means. I have really come to dislike how the term  
> "refactoring" is abused on this list to mean "explicitly breaking  
> code" instead of what it means, namely explicitly NOT breaking code.
>
> So, let's be clear: You are not talking about a refactoring. If you  
> were, I'd be cool. You are talking about a fundamental and  
> incompatible change to the FFI. And I'm not cool with that.
>
>> I am not in favor of keeping backward compatibility, in most cases it
>> makes things worse and there are already plenty of bad examples in
>> Squeak.
>
> Sure. Depending on the circumstances, e.g., how big your investment  
> in Squeak has been and how reliant you are on a specific subsystem,  
> that may be a fine option for you. Not all users of Squeak are that  
> way. And while I'm not against change in general, I will insist  
> that changes that introduce fundamental incompatibilities must be  
> carefully weighed against the benefits they bring.
>
> Otherwise, hey, I'm willing to "refactor" Squeak to use proper  
> static typing, which will make the code "more extensible",  
> "cleaner" or whatever attributes of choice you've been recently  
> using. And all you need to do is to rewrite every single method  
> declaration which seems a fair deal since you're requesting the  
> same from the FFI users. See what I mean? ;-)
>
>> The following presentation of Gilad Bracha might be interesting to
>> read, especially the end of the presentation where it says: "Rotting
>> Bits for a better World -- A model which expects incompatibility as a
>> matter of course is better than denying change."
>>     http://www.bracha.org/oopsla05-dls-talk.pdf
>
> As usual, a thought-provoking presentation from Gilad. He is  
> certainly right that being prepared for change instead of denying  
> it is the better strategy - whether that means to entirely drop  
> having any negotiated interfaces however, stands very much to  
> reason. Personally, I find that a necessary requirement to be able  
> to deal with change.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>




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