[Vm-dev] Re: Immutability, newspeak

Chris Muller asqueaker at gmail.com
Sun Jun 13 18:10:01 UTC 2010


"This episode of Debbie Downer, has been brought to you by...
GemStone!  We have persistence down to a fine art..."


On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:
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> On 2010-06-09, at 3:27 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
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>> But in what applications? I suspect that the answer is "object databases, object databases, and ... err ... object databases" ;-)
>
> Well, let's say out-of-image persistence in general. That includes object databases, O/R mapping frameworks, document databases, and command journals. A few years ago, when Seaside 2 started to take off, there was a flurry of persistence schemes written for use with Seaside. See the wiki pages about the options, for example:
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> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3582
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/512
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> None of them have been terribly successful, and Seaside apps tend to get by with persistence schemes that aren't great, but work well enough for that particular app. It's a real problem, and we've gone years without a good solution.
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> Would an immutability bit solve this mess? I don't know. One thing I do know is that any scheme for persisting objects outside an image is really freakin' hard without a good write barrier.
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> Maybe persistence *is* the only practical application of immutability. But if so, it's an important one. Seaside may be drawing new users to Smalltalk, but Squeak is the only platform without a good story on persistence. Gemstone has persistence down to a fine art. VW isn't as sexy, but it has solid connectivity to RDBMs and Gemstone, immutability, and Glorp. Squeak has nothing, or nearly so.
>
> Colin


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