On May 4, 2012, at 9:44 AM, Francisco Garau wrote:

On 2 May 2012 18:47, Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> wrote: First class instance variables will bring a lot to the system: foundation for a lot of innovation - relationships support - meta description. - bitfields description ...

I like the idea -- you could even have a BroadcasterSlot that whenever it's changed send notifications (although this might not be necessary with the Announcement framework, I haven't looked into that).

But there are a couple of points that I don't understand:

1) Slots and Layouts are descriptions of Objects and Classes and, as such, they are reflection facilities. Will this go into the "minimal" kernel image that you are trying to bootstrap? yes, because the ClassBuilder will use the layout descriptions. And because the system itself might use them.

(I think they should go to a "reflection" module on top of the kernel)

In the futuer, yes. But that is hard. In theory, you can think about a reflection-less system where reflection can be added later by loading something. But this is a hard problem in itself. Nik did some research experiments in that direction: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier/publications/bib?&query=Papo11a In the end we want to go there, but for the bootstrap this is not the first goal. (ie, we will do a boostrap that has reflection first).

2) Let's say you have a subclass of point with typed slots called FloatPoint with a couple of getter/setters. Would the generated bytecodes of the setter by the same as for the same method in the superclass?

yes. (if I understand you question correctly) Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de