"Alan Lovejoy" <squeak-dev.sourcery at forum-mail.net> writes:
> Of course, no OS I know of has the equivalent of ClassBuilders that can
> transparently migrate instances of old (versions of) classes to be instances
> of new (versions of) classes.  This deficiency is one reason why rebooting
> is so often necessary.  Static linking and/or static typing is another.

I don't know, .so's/DLL's, not to mention Unixy daemons, are actually
plenty to allow you to replace subsystems without rebooting the whole
computer.  You reboot the subsystem, but not the whole machine.  Linux
folks update all the time without rebooting.

So it seems to depend on the culture as much as the technology.  Some
programmers make their subsystems replaceable, and others do not
bother and make you reboot.


Lex