[1417] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: [COLD] Heretical Question

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Fri Apr 17 20:41:18 1998 )

Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 18:36:10 -0600 (MDT)
From: Brandon Gillespie <brandon@roguetrader.com>
To: coldstuff@cold.org
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19980417112225.00c483e0@mail.tenetwork.com>

On Fri, 17 Apr 1998 jeffk@tenetwork.com wrote:

> I've been re-evaluating my Kelvin design as I get deeper and deeper into
> my current cold based project.  I've come up with a rather heretical
> question...
> 
> How important IS run-time receivability of the "class" structure (yes I
> know Cold is classless but that's the easiest way to phrase what Im asking.)
> 
> I know many people are used to on-line editing of their object defs, but
> when push comes to shove, for a production environment what are the real
> advantages?
> 
> Does it add significantly to the expressive power of the language or
> maintainability of applications in real-world use? How so?
> 
> I'm asking because this feature has all sorts of implications that result
> in late binding and visualizations.  Without it, one could really write
> such a  system right on top of the JAVA VM rather then on a second layer of
> VM ontop of that.
> 
> Pls consider your answers carefully.

Regardless of what Microsoft tries to inflict on the world, servers are
moving to the point where staying up a LONG time is a big issue.  Although
the world may be set back by the push of NT into the region, it too will
some day (hopefully) reach the level of stability people simply expect
with unix.

With this in mind, having a server 'daemon' stay up is going to more and
more becomes a big issue.  Server design is considerably different from
client design.  In a client run-time mutability is irrelevant (because you
ARE starting/stopping it up every single time you run it) in a server it
is a whole different bear.  When you design a server that expects to
handle hundreds of users, from around the world--you can guarantee there
is NOT going to be any idle time--and having a RTM system is going to be a
very desirable feature.  As people start to realize this I suspect that
more and more in the future server langauges will start to reflect it.

-Brandon Gillespie