[squeak-dev] Streams. Status and where to go?

Colin Putney cputney at wiresong.ca
Fri Feb 26 03:22:03 UTC 2010


On 2010-02-25, at 10:33 AM, Ken G. Brown wrote:

> I think someone in the know should have a good look at Craig's Flow implementation.
> This has been available for years, yet people seem to avoid looking seriously at it.
> I believe Craig had it working on 3.9 at one point not so long ago and therefore it should work on 3.10 as well.
> 
> Unless perhaps there is some compelling issue I do not know about or understand that says it should not be used.
> 
> I think at the time it became available, there was no convenient way to have both Flow and the old implementation installed at the same time, that's mainly why it did not get accepted.

I took a look at Flow recently, with an eye toward pillaging it for the stream implementations. I decided against it, though, because Flow streams are still organized as a hierarchy of stream classes. It's maybe a saner hierarchy, maybe the code is nicer, but I don't think it solves the fundamental problem, which is that inheritance is not a very powerful design tool. Composition is much more powerful, and I think composable streams are the only way to achieve the functionality and flexibility that we need. 

So yeah, Flow is better than what we've got, but we should aim higher.

Colin


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