Objective-C & dynamism (was Re: A CoreData Limitation?)
Objective-C & dynamism (was Re: A CoreData Limitation?)
- Subject: Objective-C & dynamism (was Re: A CoreData Limitation?)
- From: Bill Bumgarner <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 13:24:45 -0700
On May 18, 2005, at 12:19 PM, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
... interesting stuff deleted ....
Given this (slight) limitation, it only makes sense to treat model
changes as something that will require an application restart and
some data migration. My reading of the CoreData docs leads me to
believe that it was intended to be used in this way - model changes
will require a recompilation and restart of the application, with
the attendant data migration.
This has nothing to do with Core Data.
By the current implementation and the entire development workflow
(and, as you noted), Objective-C does not support redefinition of
classes. In other words, if you change your NSView subclass, you
will be looking to relaunch the application if you want to see the
changes. Fix-and-continue allows one to make very specific
localized changes without re-launching the application, but class re-
definition is not one of the supported changes.
To put it succintly: The normal Mac OS X Objective-C based
development workflow requires restarting the application to see
changes. It does not matter if Core Data is being used.
Whether or not Objective-C can redefine classes on the fly is way
beyond the scope of this discussion. It is an academically
interesting discussion, certainly, but not relevant to the original
question. Specifically, the original question was in regards to how
one deals with a model change within the normal development workflow,
which very much does involve restarting the application quite regularly.
My "view" is focused very much on how the frameworks and runtime are
currently implemented on Mac OS X Tiger. It was purposefully aimed
at presenting a set of facts related to the Cocoa development
experience. I'm deeply versed in Lisp and a number of other dynamic
language technologies. Unfortunately, that knowledge is completely
irrelevant to answering the question at hand.
Subject changed to reflect the bifurcation in the original thread.
I'm all for a lively discussion about dynamic runtimes and how said
features may be better leveraged in Cocoa, but we would likely
quickly find ourselves being ushered off to some other lists... :-)
b.bum
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