Re: Where to use SELF - your opinion

[John.Maloney@Eng.Sun.COM]

Peter:

Perhaps I didn't make this clear, but the question I was answering
was "Is it appropriate to use languanges like Self and Smalltalk-80
to deliver applications?" My arguments are based only on the properties
of the programming languages, not on other practical concerns like
whether commercially available implementations exist.

If we stick to these assumptions, then you can't criticize the
Self language on the basis of its current implementation. Yes, the
current implementation does not use memory efficiently and suffers
from unpredictable execution time and compile pauses. But these are
not inherent defects of the language. All these problems can be solved
using non-inlining dynamic translation (Deutsch-Schiffman style), with
some loss of performance, and we are developing ways to use less memory
and compilation time yet still achieve performance somewhere between
Smalltalk and C/C++.

Minor nit: You forgot to mention "unsafe pointer bugs" in your list
of C/C++ costs.

How would you compare C/C++ and Smalltalk in this framework? Is there
any data available on the reliability of applications written in C/C++
versus those written in Smalltalk?

	-- John