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by moth-fuzz
694 days ago
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> One is when you are trying to create a system that inverts dependencies by allowing a plugin system or follows some sort of nuanced workflow that others might want to "hook into". I’m fairly certain that’s the use case of inheritance - at least in the Simula tradition. Classes as a means of lifetime management, moving parts that have well defined steps of operation (methods), and interchangeable parts (subtypes) which you can more or less slot into the larger system (polymorphism). It’s easier to think about classes not as nouns, but as verbs over time (or rather, bounded by time): at a specific moment in the assembly line, call this particular method, at another moment, call that other method… Object oriented programming in the Simula tradition I would even go as far as to say is just best practices in structured/procedural programming taken to their logical extremes. |
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Wrt plugin systems: at least as the class level, are classes really a means of lifetime management in practice?
IIRC, audio plugin APIs follow the shell command pattern of memory management for loading new classes-- the user dynamically loads a library into a running instance of an application, and there it stays until the application exits.
And even if plugin systems as implemented are actually unloading classes, the user is almost always just restarting the app to make sure it took. :)
Edit: clarification