Sifting Out the Gold Delivering Compact Applications from an Exploratory Object-Oriented Programming Environment

Abstract

Integrated, dynamically-typed object-oriented programming environments offer many advantages, but have trouble producing small, self-contained applications. Recent advances in type inference have made it possible to build an application extractor for Self. The extractor was able to extract a medium-sized application in a few minutes. The extracted application runs in a tenth the space of the original environment. Except for extracting reflection and sends with computed selectors, the extractor runs without human intervention and fully preserves the behavior of the application.