RE: objective-c: how slow ?

[Bissell, Tim]

Marko M wrote:

Adding methods to existing classes at runtime is completely routine.  Adding
new classes at runtime is common.  There used to be a free tool called eval
that would dynamically (just in time) recompile method implementations,
dynamically load the new implementations, and patch the runtime to use the
new versions with existing classes.  In other words, you could edit the C
code of a method implementation while the program that uses the method was
running, press a button, and load the new implementation into the running
program.

----

Ages ago (four, five years?) I wrote a Smalltalk on Objective-C-runtime
system
on NeXTStep.  Each smalltalk method in a class was a call to a function
which
translated parameters, pushed them on a Stack and called a Smalltalk
interpreter
(based on Tim Budd's Little Smalltalk).  It worked fairly well except that
the NeXT runtime would stop working if you unloaded a class, and then
reloaded a
class of the same name, which I had to do to add (Obj-C accessible) ivars to
a class.
I'll have to dig it out, and see if it works better with the latest 3.0 GCC
runtime...

Tim


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