dharris@entec.Wichita.NCR.COM (Dale Harris) (05/02/89)
I am looking for honest educated opinions based upon practical
experience regarding the applicability of Object-Oriented
Programming in the areas of operating system and peripheral
controller (subsystem) development. It seems that OOP is another
esoteric concept which some folks (non-programmers in particular)
regard as the panacea for all programming. We programmer-types
know better than to jump onto any passing bandwagon without
investigating it first :-).
I realize that OOP has its place in applications programming.
What I don't know about is the appropriateness of OOP in systems
and controller (firmware) work. The issues I and countless
others are concerned about are:
1. Does OOP work below the application, particularly in real-
time general-purpose operating systems and in event-driven
peripheral controllers?
2. Can OOP be effectively integrated at those levels into
existing non-OOP architectures?
3. How well can the concepts of OOP be applied without actually
implementing in one of the OOLanguages such as Objective C,
C++ or Eiffel?
4. How severely is performance impacted in using OOP? (For
controllers, performance on low-cost processors is more
important than elegance. Can we have both?)
5. Is dynamic configuration (runtime binding) practical in
systems and subsystems developed under C++ without
recompilation? (It is not practical to distribute compilers
in subsystems if new objects are added.)
6. Is there any available literature dealing with OOP in other
than application programming?
--
Dale Harris Software Engineering, NCR E&M Wichita
NCR:654-8025 <Dale.Harris@Wichita.NCR.COM>
(316)636-8025 <{ece-csc,hubcap,gould,rtech}!ncrcae!ncrwic!dale.harris>
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