Go and Rust — objects without class

Posted Apr 11, 2014 8:32 UTC (Fri) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465)
In reply to: Go and Rust — objects without class by VITTUIX-MAN
Parent article: Go and Rust — objects without class

> Well as I see it, Io and self seem to go to the class of languages with paradigm "objects as hash tables" which is kind of heavy weight approach to object orientation, with debatable benefits at least in a compiled languages.

At least Self implemented several powerful optimizations to remove that cost.
Thanks to that work, virtual calls can even be *inlined* in Self/SmallTalk/Java/JavaScript. But since that requires a managed language runtime (to get statistics on the target of the call), that's not supported in most C++ implementations.

I mention Self/SmallTalk/Java/JavaScript because the work was done by (some of) the same people — see the history of StrongTalk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongtalk#History. Lars Bak went on from StrongTalk to HotSpot and then to lead Google V8 (IIUC), and I learned some bits of this history first-hand from him in his Aarhus lecture on virtual machines.