Self Group at OOPSLA

[John.Maloney@Eng.Sun.COM]

My reply to John may be of general interest...

- ------- Forwarded Message
To: jrd@cadre.com (john r. durand)
Cc: self@kahuna, jmaloney
Subject: Re: forwarded message from john r. durand 
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 92 13:33:50 PDT
From: jmaloney

Hi!

Yes, the entire group will be at OOPSLA. We are not presenting any
papers but we will be at the New Programming Languages workshop and
we'll probably bring a machine along for giving spontaneous demos.

The XGL stuff is still a long way off and very researchy. We haven't
completely settled on how much graphics power we should assume will
be available in, say, 3-4 years. The real point is to see what can be
done with 3D in a programming environment, by the way. XGL is just
means to that end. Are you really interested in XGL or just in getting
our UI off of Pixrect?

Other stuff in the works includes Urs' work on using type information
from polymorhphic inline caches to guide the compiler, even better
integration with other programming languages (C and C++ for now, but
we are working on a general parser generator to make it easy to add
other languages), decreasing the memory footprint, and improving our
internal representation of source code. We are hoping to move to a
more "image" based programming model, as in Smalltalk, versus our
current text-file based model. This brings up a lot of issues involving
the support of multi-person programming projects (how can I give you
my changes to the system) and how to package and distribute applications
(how can I be sure that some method your application adds to traits
integer doesn't happen to collide with a method by the same name
added by some other application?)

Just to be clear: we just spent a whole year getting release 2.0
out the door. We are now going to do research for at least a year before
we even think about doing another release. So nothing I've described
here is likely to be available to our users for at least a year and a
half, if ever. But, with any luck, you'll get to read papers about some
of it sooner than that. :->

See you at OOPSLA!

	-- John

------- End of Forwarded Message