September 13, 1995
SOM/DSOM and Dynamic Language Frameworks: Integrating Two Worlds
What would it take for dynamic languages to be widespread, mainstream, respected ways to produce software?
What would it take to relegate C/C++ to the same role that assembly language now plays -- something used by weird, specialized hackers as a last resort, when absolute raw performance is critical?
SOM is a complete, practical implementation of the OMG CORBA standard. It provides a way to create, manipulate, and release object services -- class libraries -- with a binary standard that is independent of compiler vendor, language, and client application. DSOM distributes this capability.
This talk describes a project at IBM to provide a dynamic language framework (DLF) on top of SOM. In particular, facilities for interpreted methods with a standard p-code, automatic memory management (garbage collection), and shared runtime environment will be added. The most critical design goal is to ensure that all compiled objects can freely interoperate with interpreted objects. Developers are left with a pure tradeoff: compiled objects are faster, interpreted objects are easier (via their dynamic and flexible development environments).
I will discuss the SOM-DLF work at IBM in detail. I will also discuss differences between DLF and alternate approaches to integrating compiled and interpreted objects: wrappering and "parts" (aka VBXs).