On Jun 22, 2013, at 01:59 , Nathan Kurz <[email protected]> wrote: > Have either of you looked at it? Are there things you want to support > that it does not?
I never heard of Etoile and while I did have a look at the Objective-C 2.0 runtime, it was only because I was interested in whether supporting Objective-C as host language would be feasible. Regarding features of dynamic languages, I don't think they make sense for Clownfish. One thing that Objective-C and other dynamic languages support, for example, is adding methods or even instance variables at runtime. This would slow down Clownfish a lot. To get acceptable speed, you'll need something like inline caching which isn't feasible in plain C. (That's also one of the reasons why Parrot failed.) But there are some useful features from languages with static OO like Java that could be implemented without impact on performance. Class methods should be an easy one, for example. Interfaces would be useful, too, but more involved. Also, every Clownfish feature must be mapped to the host language. This automatically rules out anything too exotic. Nick
