Re: [Xotcl] TIP #257: Object Orientation for Tcl

From: Zoran Vasiljevic <zv_at_archiware.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:18:18 +0200

Am 26.09.2005 um 19:40 schrieb Jeff Hobbs:

>
> TIP #257: Object Orientation for Tcl
> http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/257
>

First of all, this is a step in the right direction which
should have been done *years* ago already. Many thanks to
the creators of the TIP for their courage to open this
can of worms again. I believe there will be many kudos
*and* resistance from the user base of (all) OO systems
luring arround in the Tcl community.

We are using XOTcl in a commercial MT-app already 5 years
and, personally, I doubt that a (new) piece of software
can reach the stability, performance and functionality
of XOTcl in a reasonable time. Hey, since the proposal
is based on XOTcl, why just not adopt XOTcl codebase?
This would save lots of time and effort. I do understand
that from syntactical point of view, some XOTcl pieces
may/should be ommited or changed to satisfy C#/C++/Java
folks, allright, but I believe this is easier done by
taking the XOTCl codebase and tweak it, rather to write
all from scratch.

I have skipped thru the TIP in fast forward mode (more
detailed sweep is on the todo list) and one things jumped
into my face:

    Class::volatile: This feature is ommited

WHY FOR HEAVENS SAKE?

Seriously, the auto-garbage collection of objects is *crucial*
for any serious use. It saves you awkward and error-prone
constructs. Anybody doing any serious OO programming knows
how complex the garbage-collection can be. I cannot imagine
to live w/o this feature.

So, as said, more to come as I get more time to read the TIP
in depth.

Cheers
Zoran