On 05/05/2011 05:26 PM, Cédrick Béler wrote:
Lastly, most Smalltalk systems are image based...
...which makes you feel the system is "alive", hence one **huge
benefit** of Smalltalk: its debugger which enables on the fly
debbuging... and also test driven development (real one [1]) where you
can run incomplete code and code what's missing iteratively when you
need it (Smalltalk is a live system, not only a language as somebody
said lately).
Cédrick
[1] see in particular this webcast:
http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/01/starting-with-sunit-and-debugger.html
Seriously ... these points in favor of the image are so m00t. Lets see
how it would work without an image:
I write a C application which I link to GCC. Now I run GDB on my
application, and while running I have the whole GCC compiler collection
at my disposal while running. While debugging (at some breakpoint) I
just let the GCC library compile some C code for me; I turn on the
executable flag and whooptidoo, I have a Smalltalk like debugger for C.
This is totally unrelated to having an image; it's just a great debugger
implementation. 2 completely different things. No reason why this
wouldn't work for C; except for the fact that they didn't do it yet
(those lazy bastards).
