On 2011-05-05, at 17:39, Cédrick Béler wrote: > > Le 5 mai 2011 à 17:32, Toon Verwaest a écrit : > >> 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). > > ok, true :) > > but, it's not only the debugger... getting senders, implementers, class that > use it, methods that contains this word, ... > of course, this is doable with files (see eclipse *sigh*), but I prefer the > snappy feeling of an image for that...
the snappiness could be easily achieved with a fulltext search index (just look how fast spotlight works on a couple of millions of files on my machine...) The main issue of the image, is that it locks you out, making it close to impossible to use other tools than smalltalk. Though the nice thing about the image is that you can start up your IDE in less than a second, and again, this is not necessarily linked to Smalltalk and could be achieved for C programs as well.
