Re: Porting SWARM to JAVA or C++

[Manor Askenazi]

Christoph Schlumpf writes:

  ... It should be no great problem to do swarm in java (besides of 
  manpower and time) ...

This discussion is obviously academic (which sort of makes sense on 
a list with so many .edu addresses), nevertheless there comes a point 
where ignoring real world constraints smacks of silliness not academia.

In other words, yeah, Christoph, if you can find the manpower and you 
can find the time, please, increase our options. Right now, we are 
still using funding that we *miraculously* got from DARPA to finish
this *FREE* version of Swarm which started at a time when Java didn't
even exist! Also, keep in mind that we've had maybe 1.5 programmers
working on this at any given time - so you see that manpower, time
and, by implication, money, are for some obscure reason, less than 
trivial constraints...

Having said that, the real reasons for remaining in Objective-C are 
and will remain technical, and for an explanation of these issue I 
defer to Roger's reply to a similar question which you will find in 
our hyper-mail archive:

http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/archive/list-archive.9607/0001.html

The discussion is slightly dated in that it disregards the "Reflections" 
API, which you mentioned in your mail and which presumably did not exist
when Roger wrote his mail. However, issues like the lack of pointers and
low-level data structures remain, and seem, IMHO, to constitute serious 
drawbacks when considering a port to Java. 

Regards,

Manor.