Some time ago we have had ruby vs ~ada discussions, or more generally
ruby and “large scale applications” - actually, the people that
contributed their (impressive) knowledge made this quite interesting.
So here I start again - with my lack of knowledge. Ruby vs Smalltalk.
I only wrote a tiny bit of smalltalk so far. Some things remind me of
ruby like the |block| syntax (but the smalltalk people seem to like to
do the |block| in a new line and whenever I saw this in ruby, i was
puzzled, because I am used to having the |block| in the same line).
Actually come to look at it, I dont so much like the syntax of
smalltalk. I think Ruby’s syntax is cleaner than smalltalk’s and I also
am not too fond of using := instead of = for assignment. (The Io
language uses := too and I’d really have it the other way around, so
that = means assignment, rather than “update slot”)
Anyway, there is one thing which I believe totally rocks in smalltalk
and I still have not understood it completely.
It is that image thing.
Of course I am interested in this due to the recent exposure of Maglev,
additionally some older praises towards smalltalk-squeak, but also about
the general VM discussions regarding ruby. And on IRC drbrain mentioned
that there are objects which are nearly thirty years old (in some
images), which I found astonishing. (Havent even thought that objects
“age” too … can I have my immortal objects in the matrix please? ;> )
My brain also connects this to other discussions I have had (on
Gobolinux), where a few talked about a filesystem which uses a database
rather than the current FHS approach with flat files being spread
everywhere. I think the idea that an image is used for both storing
where files are (and then would do away with the problem of requiring
absolute paths for anything actually, because i think having the need
to store absolute, hardcoded paths is really bad if one needs
flexibility), and also the complete OS (in form of objects and their
data) is simply … well, “cool”.
But it seems as if this whole VM or rather image thing is hardly used
outside Smalltalk. Which sounds like a shame, unless I missed something
perhaps? Can ruby have such an image based system additionally?