Marcus Denker wrote:
I personally think that with today's resources (my laptop has 4GB of Ram, not 256Kb), we should rethink some of the design-desicions taken 30 years ago. But many people are violently against this, fighting a battle by citing "embedded systems". If one manages to convince them that "embedded" these days does not equal "small", they mumble about "smart dust" and obscure things just to be able to fight for hacks not needed these days...
Exploring new ways with the resources we have today does not mean that everything needs to live in the image. It means that one can affort to invest resources into very general, reusable solution to problems like this.
Didn't Tim change CompiledMethods so they referred to their source using a pointer so the source could be stored anywhere?
One interesting aspect of the source/changes "outside the image" is that this problem of data that is not used often and thus can live on disk vs. memory is a general one. Hacking it into the system just for the sources is just that: a hack. Providing a general, scalable way to let objects live on disk that are not needed is much better, as everyone can than use it. The system can use it for other resources (fonts, images...). Programmers can use it to keep their domain data on disk automatically.
You mean something like LOOM? I would love to have that :)