🚀 go-pugleaf

If there is to be a "reusable components" cottage industry, probably
many components will only be available as specifications plus runnable
code in object form.  This suggests that source-level optimizations
that cross package/module boundaries may be of relatively little use.

What, then, can be done about the (apparent) inefficiency of reusable
components?  The above argument suggests we should concentrate on
designing abstract reusable components which at least permit efficient
implementations, and then try to build very efficient realizations of
these abstract components.  Performance trade-offs among different
operations of the same component are inevitable, so we'll need to
allow multiple implementations of the same abstraction to give the
client programmer a choice of performance alternatives.  And perhaps
we should concentrate on, say, advances in run-time system design and
in architectures so that genericity and the like do not introduce
additional run-time overheads and so procedure calls are much faster.

These might be more productive approaches for the long term than ever
more complex compiler tricks whose effectiveness would be thwarted if
reusability actually became a reality.

	-Bruce

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Prof. Bruce W. Weide
Dept. of Computer and Information Science
The Ohio State University
2036 Neil Ave. Mall
Columbus, Ohio  43210-1277
USA

Phone:   614-292-1517
E-mail:  weide@cis.ohio-state.edu